Perspective: Dietary Biomarkers of Intake and Exposure—Exploration with Omics Approaches

Abstract

While conventional nutrition research has yielded biomarkers such as doubly labeled water for energy metabolism and 24-h urinary nitrogen for protein intake, a critical need exists for additional, equally robust biomarkers that allow for objective assessment of specific food intake and dietary exposure. Recent advances in high-throughput MS combined with improved metabolomics techniques and bioinformatic tools provide new opportunities for dietary biomarker development. In September 2018, the NIH organized a 2-d workshop to engage nutrition and omics researchers and explore the potential of multiomics approaches in nutritional biomarker research. The current Perspective summarizes key gaps and challenges identified, as well as the recommendations from the workshop that could serve as a guide for scientists interested in dietary biomarkers research. Topics addressed included study designs for biomarker development, analytical and bioinformatic considerations, and integration of dietary biomarkers with other omics techniques. Several clear needs were identified, including larger controlled feeding studies, testing a variety of foods and dietary patterns across diverse populations, improved reporting standards to support study replication, more chemical standards covering a broader range of food constituents and human metabolites, standardized approaches for biomarker validation, comprehensive and accessible food composition databases, a common ontology for dietary biomarker literature, and methodologic work on statistical procedures for intake biomarker discovery. Multidisciplinary research teams with appropriate expertise are critical to moving forward the field of dietary biomarkers and producing robust, reproducible biomarkers that can be used in public health and clinical research.

An Integrative Approach to Assessing Diet–Cancer Relationships

“…This underscores the need for further studies, particularly the replication and validation of biomarkers in larger populations. In 2018, the National Institutes of Health convened a 2-day workshop on the use of multi-omics for the discovery of nutritional biomarkers [54]. The recognition of the dearth of multi-omic studies and opportunities for novel nutritional biomarker discovery by the major research funding body in the United States will hopefully spur progress in the field.…”

“…The recognition of the dearth of multi-omic studies and opportunities for novel nutritional biomarker discovery by the major research funding body in the United States will hopefully spur progress in the field. The resulting publication from the workshop also eloquently highlights the many challenges for diet biomarker discovery including the need for more data on dietary patterns, the food metabolome, the establishment of dynamic ranges of biomarkers, and the need for standardized collection, analysis and reporting of biospecimens and biomarker data to facilitate study replication [54].…”

“…The identification of subgroups that vary in their response to diet requires large, diverse populations in different regions of the world, particularly in the case of rare polymorphisms. Large samples with a reasonable range and variation in dietary intake are also needed to identify robust biomarkers and importantly, validate measurements, as currently few biomarkers of diet have been validated [54]. Larger feeding studies that include a variety of foods and dietary patterns are necessary to spur the identification of biomarker candidates.…”

“…Studies are likely to uncover concentration biomarkers; indirect measures of intake that reflect the concentration of a chemical or compound that is subject to individual variation in metabolism rather than true intake which is the aim of self-reported dietary assessment [43]. Biomarkers do not provide contextual factors related to dietary consumption that is captured in self-reporting, they tend to be expensive, and as of yet have not been shown to be sensitive or specific to intake [54]. Combined approaches to dietary assessment which use food frequency questionnaires (FFQs), together with 24-hr recall or food diaries can reduce the error in estimation [63], however the burden on participants is greater and response rates decline over subsequent collection time points [64].…”

Specificity, Dose Dependency, and Kinetics of Markers of Chicken and Beef Intake Using Targeted Quantitative LC‐MS/MS: A Human Intervention Trial

“…According to the recent classification by Maruvada et al, they are referred to as food component intake biomarkers (FCIBs). [38] To assure the specificity of food markers, a thorough understanding as to why compounds are specific to a certain food source. Also, food composition databases need significant expansion to be able to make conclusions about specificity.…”