Foods and Food Components as Probes of Lipid Metabolism in a Challenge Meal

Abstract

Chronic metabolic diseases are complex and difficult to diagnose/treat. The underlying metabolic disturbances which lead to the manifestation of disease symptoms are multiple and interconnected. New ways of assessing health status which can detect predispositions to disease as well as diagnose and monitor underlying metabolism are needed. Health is more accurately described as the ability of an organism to respond to a variety of challenges, including nutritional. Metabolomics measures a breadth of endpoints simultaneously as quantitative metabolite measurements. Metabolomic analyses also make it possible to use a mixture of nutritional challenges designed to test individual biological responses. In this study, challenge meals were used as probes of lipid metabolism in order to test the use of certain foods and food components to explore areas of lipid metabolism. Liquid meals were formulated and fed to volunteers. Blood was sampled before and at multiple time points after the meal, followed by lipoprotein fractionation, and quantitative lipomic analyses. Specialized bioinformatic tools developed for the analysis of the lipomic data revealed patterns in lipid metabolism that differed between individuals. This response to challenge approach holds promise as a new nutritional/health assessment that can be applied in clinical practice to improve the diagnosis and monitoring of health in individuals.