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

Eleni Papadopoulou,Nikos Stratakis,Martine Vrijheid,Maribel Casas,Trudy Voortman,Barbara Heude,Theano Roumeliotaki,Christopher Millett,Lydiane Agier,Leda Chatzi,Chung-Ho E Lau,Helle Margrete Meltzer,Katerina Margetaki,Oliver Robinson,John Wright,Eduard Sabidó,Serena Fossati,Muireann Coen,Xavier Basagaña,Marina Vafeiadi,Fernanda Rauber,Sílvia Fernández–Barrés ,Paolo Víneis ,Anne Lise Brantsæter ,Sandra Andrušaitytė ,Yinjian Zhao ,Anh Minh Nguyen ,Rosemary Mceachan ,Eva Borràs ,José Urquiza ,Alexandros P Siskos ,David V Conti ,Hector C Keun ,Léa Maitre ,Regina Gražulevičienė

doi:10.7554/elife.71332

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 1H NMR spectroscopy in a multicountry 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 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.

Highlights

Dietary habits are considered a key element for the prevention of chronic noncommunicable diseases (Grosso et al, 2020)
When we examined the associations with the metabolite scores for each diet quality indicator, we found that the scores for KIDMED were associated with lower C-p eptide, while opposite associations were observed with the metabolite scores for Ultra-p rocessed foods (UPFs) (Supplementary file 1j)
In the pairwise associations between the individual urinary metabolites linked to KIDMED or UPF intake and C-peptide, we found that higher levels of sucrose were associated with higher C-p eptide levels

Summary

Introduction

Dietary habits are considered a key element for the prevention of chronic noncommunicable diseases (Grosso et al, 2020). There is a need for novel approaches to better elucidate diet-related metabolic alterations and their association with disease risk. Metabolomics is the systematic study of small-m olecule metabolites in a biological system and has recently emerged as a powerful top-d own approach providing a comprehensive phenotype of biological status. Urinary metabolic phenotypes carry rich information on environmental, lifestyle and nutritional exposures, physiological and metabolic status, and disease risks on an individual and population level (Gibson et al, 2020; Collins et al, 2019; Rebholz et al, 2018). Urine specimens have high concentrations of food-d erived metabolites and studies have shown that urinary metabolic profiles could provide an objective measure of dietary intake (O’Gorman and Brennan, 2017)

Methods

Results

Conclusion