You Are What You Eat, Metabolomically Speaking
The connection between nutrition and health outcomes is surprisingly indirect. For example, we know that fruits and vegetables are good for you. They’re packed with beneficial stuff like vitamins and fiber. However, it’s far less clear what exactly happens inside the body when you eat them — or any other kind of food.
Researchers have historically relied on tools like food frequency questionnaires and diaries to provide clues, but in a new paper, researchers at UC San Diego describe an approach called untargeted metabolomics that identifies the vast number of molecules derived from food and links them to relevant chemical inventories.
“The expanded ability to understand how what we eat translates into products and byproducts of metabolism has direct implications for human health,” said co-corresponding author Pieter Dorrestein, PhD, director of the Collaborative Mass Spectrometry Innovation Center at Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at UC San Diego.
“We can now use this approach to obtain diet information empirically and understand relationships to clinical outcomes. It is now possible to link molecules in diet to health outcomes not one at a time but all at once, which has not been possible before.”
The study has “huge implications” for future research, say the authors.
“The potential to read out diet from a sample directly has huge implications for research in populations, like people with Alzheimer’s Disease, who may not be able to remember or explain what they ate,” said co-corresponding author Rob Knight, PhD, director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation at UC San Diego.
“And in wildlife conservation applications. Good luck getting a cheetah or a gorilla, to name just two species out of the hundreds we’re studying, to fill out a food diary.”
— Scott LaFee