Urinary metabolic biomarkers of diet quality in European children are associated with metabolic health

Abstract

Urinary metabolic profiling is a promising powerful tool to reflect dietary intake and can help understand metabolic alterations in response to diet quality. Here, we used 1HNMR spectroscopy in a multi-country study in European children (1147 children from 6 different cohorts) and identified a common panel of 4 urinary metabolites (hippurate, N-methylnicotinic acid, urea and sucrose) that was predictive of Mediterranean diet adherence (KIDMED) and ultra-processed food (UPF) consumption and also had higher capacity in discriminating children’s diet quality than that of established sociodemographic determinants. Further, we showed that the identified metabolite panel also reflected the associations of these diet quality indicators with C-peptide, a stable and accurate marker of insulin resistance and future risk of metabolic disease. This methodology enables objective assessment of dietary patterns in European child populations, complementary to traditional questionary methods, and can be used in future studies to evaluate diet quality. Moreover, this knowledge can provide mechanistic evidence of common biological pathways that characterize healthy and unhealthy dietary patterns, and diet-related molecular alterations that could associate to metabolic disease.

Altered dietary behaviour during pregnancy impacts systemic metabolic phenotypes

“…In non-pregnant cohorts 4-deoxythreonic acid is associated with major depressive disorder (85). In a dietary study comparing the impact of a Mediterranean diet with that of an ultraprocessed food diet, 4-deoxythreonic acid was inversely associated with the Mediterranean diet (85), consistent with the results we observe here.…”

“…Urinary concentrations of these products of threonine catabolism have been shown to increase over the course of pregnancy (83) and have been found to be correlated with BMI (84). In non-pregnant cohorts 4-deoxythreonic acid is associated with major depressive disorder (85). In a dietary study comparing the impact of a Mediterranean diet with that of an ultraprocessed food diet, 4-deoxythreonic acid was inversely associated with the Mediterranean diet (85), consistent with the results we observe here.…”