The crucial role of nutrition in health necessitates the development of dietary assessment tools capable of accurately assessing causal relationships with various health-related consequences. A recent study published in Nature Metabolism examines the potential utility of biomarkers of food intake (BFIs) on objective and accurate dietary assessments. Study: Towards nutrition with precision: unlocking biomarkers as dietary assessment tools .
Image Credit: Gorodenkoff / Shutterstock.com BFIs are often used to evaluate dietary adherence in nutritional intervention and meal studies, assess the extent of misreporting, as well as validate epidemiologically-derived associations between food and disease risk. While food frequency questionnaires (FFQs) and dietary recalls are also useful assessment tools, their subjective nature can lead to biased reporting and poor compliance.
A BFI is a metabolite of ingested food and is defined as a measure of the consumption of specific food groups, foods, or food components. BFIs can be ranked based on their robustness, in which minimal interference from a varied dietary background affects the use of the BFI in research. Reliability in BFIs implies that this marker is in qualitative and/or quantitative agreement with other biomarkers or dietary instruments.
Plausibility depends on the specificity and chemical relationship of the metabolite to the nutrient in question, which limits the risk of misclassification due to other factors. Biologic variab.
