Nutritional metabolomics: validating food intake biomarkers and applying them to estimate diet-health associations

The goal of this program is to apply metabolomics to objectively describe acute and habitual dietary intake among individuals in large cohorts and to link this exposure data and self-reported dietary intake data to later human and environmental health.

Two previous grants allowed us to discover metabolomic fingerprints of acute intake in single meals, of habitual intake and responses to complex diets.

This second phase aims to validate our putative food intake biomarkers in terms of time-response, reliability and robustness as well as ability to truly quantify dietary intake. Effects of dietary patterns on health also will be investigated.

The project accounts for dietary climate effects by focusing on animal vs plant-based diets as well as diet biodiversity.

Biofluids stored at – 80°C and dietary intake data mostly already collected within our controlled intervention trials and a large population-based cohort will be used. Urine and serum samples are analyzed at the Swedish NMR Centre. Today, dietary risks are a leading risk factor for premature death globally.

Nutrition research and interventions are hampered by difficulties in accurately measuring dietary intake in free-living individuals. Metabolomics offers objective solutions to characterize dietary intake.

Still, further validation of these putative biomarkers and ways to combine them with self-reported measures, as proposed in this application, are urgently needed.