‘You are what you eat,’ and now researchers know exactly what you’re eating: Matching blood or stool samples to a reference database of foods reveals how much of our body chemistry is traceable to what we consume

An international team of scientists, led by researchers at University of California San Diego, report a new method called untargeted metabolomics to identify the vast number of molecules derived from food that were previously unidentified, but that appear in our blood and our stool.

The method, described in the July 7, 2022 issue of Nature Biotechnology, matched all of the products of metabolism in a specimen to large databases of samples where chemical inventories were available, providing an unprecedented catalog of the molecule signatures created by consuming food or by processing it in our gut.

The authors said that, used broadly, the new approach could dramatically expand understanding of the sources of chemicals in many kinds of human, animal and environmental samples.

“Untargeted mass spectrometry is a very sensitive technique that allows for the detection of hundreds to thousands of molecules that can now be used to create a diet profile of individuals,” said co-corresponding author Pieter Dorrestein, PhD, director of the Collaborative Mass Spectrometry Innovation Center at Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego.

“The expanded ability to understand how what we eat translates into products and byproducts of metabolism has direct implications for human health. We can now use this approach to obtain diet information empirically and understand relationships to clinical outcomes. It is now possible to link molecules in diet to health outcomes not one at a time but all at once, which has not been possible before.”

Metabolomics involves the comprehensive measurement of all metabolites in a biological specimen. Metabolites are the substances, usually small molecules, made or used when an organism breaks down food, drugs, chemicals or its own tissues. They are the products of metabolism. The study also used a related technique, metagenomics, to measure genetic material in biological samples and characterize microbes present.

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