Human foods are comprised of over 25,000 different compounds, this warrants a new metabolome to be categorized: the food metabolome. Understanding the human endogenous and a dietary food metabolism is useful in understanding what metabolites are essential and non-essential to the human. The “food metabolome” has been defined as the sum of all metabolites directly derived from the digestion of foods, their absorption in the gut, and biotransformation by the host tissues and the microbiota. Others define the “food metabolome” simply as the whole set of food constituents in any foods. The human food metabolism is defined more like the first definition.
It was through these early metabolome studies that scientists realized that the human metabolome was not as small or as simple as first imagined. In particular, noticeable differences in human metabolomes could be detected that appeared to depend strongly on diet, sex, health status, genetics, kinetics, physiology, and age—with diet being most important. The human metabolome contains 50,000 different detectable compounds, while some plant species metabolomes contain up to 200,000 metabolites.
METABOLOMICS AND DISCOVERY OF NOVEL DIETARY BIOMARKERS
A nutritional biomarker can be any biological specimen that is an indicator of nutritional status with respect to intake or metabolism of dietary constituents. It can be a biochemical, functional or clinical index of status of an essential nutrient or other dietary constituent. – Google
To establish human food metabolomic profiles, biomarkers were identified from both literature and in lab studies using GC-MS, LC-MS, and NMR on biofluids (mostly urine and blood). Statistical analyses preformed with Matlab.
UTILITY OF FOOD METABOLIC PROFILES
- Finding diet-related diseases, understanding the relationships between diet and health, and understanding dietary means of combating disease
- Finding new bioactive food derived metabolites, non-endogenous
- Useful information in databases