Nutrimetabolomic Strategies To Develop New Biomarkers of Intake and Health Effects

Abstract

Correctly assessing the metabolic status of subjects after consumption of specific diets is an important challenge for modern nutrition. Recently, metabolomics has been proposed as a powerful tool for exploring the complex relationship between nutrition and health. Nutritional metabolomics, through investigating the role that dietary components play in the maintenance of health and development of risk disease, aims to identify new biomarkers that allow the intake of these compounds to be monitored and related to their expected biological effects. This review offers an overview of the application of nutrimetabolomic strategies in the discovery of new biomarkers in human nutritional research, suggesting three main categories: (1) assessment of nutritional and dietary interventions; (2) diet exposure and food consumption monitoring; and (3) health phenotype and metabolic impact of diet. For this purpose, several examples of these applications will be used to provide evidence and to discuss the advantages and drawbacks of these nutrimetabolomic strategies.

An NMR metabolomics approach reveals a combined-biomarkers model in a wine interventional trial with validation in free-living individuals of the PREDIMED study

“…Tartrate, 2,3-butanediol, ethanol, ethyl glucuronide and mannitol are described compounds present in wine (Liu, 2002;Son et al, 2009;Son et al, 2008), while 3-methyl-2-oxovalerateis a product of degradation of branched-chain amino acids. Elsewhere, in a previous work conducted by our group, hippurate and 4-hydroxyphenylacetate were significantly associated with consumers of dealcoholized wine (Vazquez-Fresno et al 2012). This fact suggests a possible impact of ethanol on the metabolic pathways related to the excretion of both compounds.…”

Novel Multimetabolite Prediction of Walnut Consumption by a Urinary Biomarker Model in a Free-Living Population: the PREDIMED Study

“…48 However, everyday advances in technology should soon lead to improved efficiency and precision in biomarker determinations, making them more economical and, therefore, more accessible for application in dietary studies. 14 An important strength of the study is that it included free-living volunteers following their customary diet and with varying walnut consumption levels, providing more reliable data than highly controlled studies. It is also important to note the use of a combination of multivariate and univariate analyses as complementary statistical techniques to better characterize discriminant metabolites.…”

“…However, their replication in free-living populations has hardly been tested so far. 14 In this context, replication allows the level of evidence from observed associations to be increased, as has been suggested for genomic studies. 16 Recently a critical review highlighted the new prospects that untargeted metabolomics displays for providing added value in the current nutritional research field to enable us to go much further than we have been able to do using traditional approaches.…”

Nutrimetabolomics fingerprinting to identify biomarkers of bread exposure in a free-living population from the PREDIMED study cohort

“…In this regard, the study of food metabolome, being a datadriven approach, is expected to be more objective in the measurement of dietary exposure (Llorach et al 2012) than traditional methods, such as food frequency questionnaires (FFQs), 24-hour dietary recalls or food diaries.…”