The food metabolome for precision nutrition in dementia prevention

Abstract

AbstractUnderstanding which aspects of diet and lifestyle may predispose to the development of Alzheimer’s disease and identifying populations vulnerable to prevention by lifestyle modification is a critical asset for precision prevention. However, diet is a complex exposure that is extremely challenging to evaluate using questionnaires in human populations, and inherent measurement error in self‐reported dietary intake data has certainly hampered our way to study properly the impact of nutrition on brain health in epidemiological studies.Measuring markers of nutritional exposure in biological matrices represents a unique way to monitor nutrition and dietary intakes. Candidate biomarkers have been complemented recently by a comprehensive investigation in biological matrices of the chemicals derived from foods after digestion and metabolism, the so‐called food metabolome, that has started to reveal novel dietary biomarkers. High‐throughput metabolomics now enable the measurement of markers of food exposures in biological matrices with unprecedented depth, while capturing the heterogeneity in the response to dietary bioactives from diet across individuals and populations. Thus biomarkers are critical for precision nutrition, as they reflect nutritional status, a product of intakes and of endogenous metabolism, itself linked to many factors, including personal genetic background and microbiome.This “Perspectives” presentation will overview a few recent exploratory studies on signatures of healthy diets and brain health in the food metabolome as examples to discuss challenges and opportunities for further developments. We will also address opportunities of development of multi‐biomarker panels combining self‐reported nutritional intake data with biomarker data from biofluids (blood and urine) to improve assessment of healthy dietary patterns as preventive approaches in dementia.