Metabolomic Biomarkers Reflect Usual Dietary Pattern: A Review

The composition of dietary intake plays an important role in metabolism, maintaining health and preventing chronic disease. Because we eat many foods every day and not just one nutrient or food, nutrition researchers began studying the whole diet by characterizing usual dietary intake as ‘diet patterns’, ‘diet quality’, diet scores, or diet indexes. Because self-report dietary intake is typically misreported, employing metabolomic biomarkers or a panel of biomarkers may better classify usual dietary intake or diet pattern than the use of self-reported dietary intake alone. We reviewed the current metabolomic literature with the aim of identifying relevant compounds among dietary pattern studies that may be useful in future dietary-metabolomic research. The most common diet patterns were the Western pattern (or high meat intake) and the plant-based pattern (or high in fruit and vegetables, and low in meat). Similar findings of greater carnitine and TMAO concentrations were demonstrated for the diet patterns high in meat. The plant-based diet patterns had higher glycerophosphatidylcholines and sphingolipids, but lower TMAO concentrations. However, the metabolomic pattern varied regardless of the common intake of high or low meat pattern. This may be partly explained by several methodologic differences in study design, which make comparison of the study findings difficult.