The role of metabonomics as a tool for augmenting nutritional information in epidemiological studies

Abstract

Most chronic diseases have been demonstrated to have a link to nutrition. Within food and nutritional research there is a major driver to understand the relationship between diet and disease in order to improve health of individuals. However, the lack of accurate dietary intake assessment in free-living populations, makes accurate estimation of how diet is associated with disease risk difficulty. Thus, there is a pressing need to find solutions to the inaccuracy of dietary reporting. Metabolic profiling of urine or plasma can provide an unbiased approach to characterizing dietary intake and various high-throughput analytical platforms have been used in order to implement targeted and nontargeted assays in nutritional clinical trials and nutritional epidemiology studies. This review describes first the challenges presented in interpreting the relationship between diet and health within individual and epidemiological frameworks. Second, we aim to explore how metabonomics can benefit different types of nutritional studies and discuss the critical importance of selecting appropriate analytical techniques in these studies. Third, we propose a strategy capable of providing accurate assessment of food intake within an epidemiological framework in order establish accurate associations between diet and health.

Charged metabolite biomarkers of food intake assessed via plasma metabolomics in a population-based observational study in Japan

“…A lot of pioneering efforts of dietary biomarkers have been reported so far, aiming at several applications, such as objective quantification of specific metabolites related to food intake [12,15], identification of proper dietary patterns by interventions [13,14,17,32], and dietary profiling in epidemiological studies [32,33]. Furthermore, large-scale metabolomics studies across a wide range of countries and regions have reported extensive investigations, to clarify the relationships between food intake, metabolites, and disease risk.…”

Objective assessment of dietary patterns by use of metabolic phenotyping: a randomised, controlled, crossover trial

“…We now propose a new approach to assess dietary patterns using proton nuclear magnetic resonance ( 1 H-NMR) spectroscopic profiling. This technology has potential to simultaneously measure hundreds of metabolites, the concentrations of which are affected by food intake 19 . If validated, this approach could enhance understanding of the relation between food consumption and disease risk, a concept embedded in the Precision Medicine Initiative 20 .…”

An Analytical Pipeline for Quantitative Characterization of Dietary Intake: Application To Assess Grape Intake

“…[5,6] There is an unmet need for quantifiable dietary biomarkers that accurately reflect consumption of foods and nutrients. [4] Dietary intake biomarkers are based on the concept that excretion levels of food-related metabolites are highly correlated with food intake over a given period of time. These biomarkers can be components of the food itself, excreted unchanged, or compounds that have undergone metabolic conversion by the human or by the resident gut bacteria.…”