Can Your Blood Plasma Detect What You Eat?
Self-reporting is one of the primary ways that dietitians, medical doctors, and researchers assess people’s diets and their health effects. While useful, self-reporting, often through dietary records or questionnaires, creates a risk of inaccurate data.
To address these limitations, researchers analyzed metabolites (molecules like amino acids and peptides created during or after metabolic processes) in blood and determined that they have potential as objective biomarkers to evaluate the foods we consume.
“Typically, if we asked a person to eat a certain type of diet, they might say they did on their self-reported diet records, but maybe they didn’t actually consume the diet as well as they reported, so by analyzing metabolites in blood in controlled feeding studies, we may potentially be able to use these as biomarkers of dietary patterns in the future,” says Andrea J. Glenn, assistant professor of nutrition, at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
Excerpted from NYU
