AS560 – Serum and urine metabolite profiles of diet measured by weighed food

Investigator Names and Contact Information

Steven C. Moore [moorest@mail.nih.gov]

Mary Playdon [mary.playdon@nih.gov]

Introduction/Intent

Dietary biomarker development seeks to improve dietary assessment accuracy to better measure true diet-disease relationships, with the goal of more accurately determining the proportion of preventable disease cases with dietary improvements and to determine targets for disease prevention interventions. Improvements in mass-spectrometry have enabled the measurement of up to thousands of metabolites simultaneously in blood or urine.  These "metabolomics"-based methods have been applied to feeding and population studies to uncover dozens of novel candidate dietary biomarkers.  With metabolomics data now available on tens of thousands of participants in large-scale prospective cohort studies, researchers and institutions will soon be investigating how these putative dietary biomarkers relate to disease risk.  While these studies will provide valuable information, they will be limited in their ability to draw public health-relevant conclusions by an incomplete understanding of the true relationship between candidate dietary biomarkers and a gold standard measure of dietary intake, i.e. weighed food.

Using data from 153 postmenopausal women participating in the Nutrition and Physical Activity Assessment Study Ancillary Feeding Study, we will use metabolomics (liquid chromatography tandem mass-spectrometry, Metabolon Inc.) to validate and identify new candidate serum and urine dietary biomarkers that explain a greater proportion of variation in intake of specific foods or food groups than for questionnaire-based measures alone. These metabolites will reflect a controlled measure of usual food consumption that is applicable to population studies.

Specific Aims

Our overall goal is to estimate how consumption of 73 foods, food groups, beverages and dietary supplements over 14 days is associated with post-consumption metabolite levels in serum and urine.  We will specifically examine correlations of dietary intake with:

1) Levels of ~1,000+ individual metabolites in each of serum and urine

2) Metabolite profile scores, based on related metabolite groups, in each of serum and urine

Secondary aims

1) Assess the changes in magnitude of diet-metabolite correlations when diet is measured an increasing number of days prior to biospecimen collection. We will estimate the association between consumption of 73 foods, food groups, beverages and dietary supplements measured by weight for each of the last 4 days of a 14-day feeding study that encompass a 4-day menu cycle (days 11, 12, 13, and 14), and levels of post-consumption serum/24-hour urine metabolites.

2) Explore modification of the association between select metabolites and foods, food groups, beverages and dietary supplements by a) resting energy expenditure (REE), b) physical activity energy expenditure (PAEE), c) body mass index (BMI), and d) age.

Note: This study uses samples collected by the NPAAS Feeding Study (AS272).