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Review
. 2021 May 31;10(6):1249.
doi: 10.3390/foods10061249.

You Are What You Eat: Application of Metabolomics Approaches to Advance Nutrition Research

Abdul-Hamid M Emwas  1 , Nahla Al-Rifai  2 , Kacper Szczepski  3 , Shuruq Alsuhaymi  3 , Saleh Rayyan  4 , Hanan Almahasheer  5 , Mariusz Jaremko  3 , Lorraine Brennan  6 , Joanna Izabela Lachowicz  7
Affiliations
Review

You Are What You Eat: Application of Metabolomics Approaches to Advance Nutrition Research

Abdul-Hamid M Emwas et al. Foods. .

Abstract

A healthy condition is defined by complex human metabolic pathways that only function properly when fully satisfied by nutritional inputs. Poor nutritional intakes are associated with a number of metabolic diseases, such as diabetes, obesity, atherosclerosis, hypertension, and osteoporosis. In recent years, nutrition science has undergone an extraordinary transformation driven by the development of innovative software and analytical platforms. However, the complexity and variety of the chemical components present in different food types, and the diversity of interactions in the biochemical networks and biological systems, makes nutrition research a complicated field. Metabolomics science is an "-omic", joining proteomics, transcriptomics, and genomics in affording a global understanding of biological systems. In this review, we present the main metabolomics approaches, and highlight the applications and the potential for metabolomics approaches in advancing nutritional food research.

Keywords: MS; NMR; food; metabolomics; nutrition.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Number of published papers over the years. Each line represents search results conducted (13 January 2021) on Web of Science (www.webofknowledge.com, accessed on 13 January 2021) for: (blue) topic: (metabolomics) and topic: (food), (orange) topic: (metabolomics) and topic: (nutrition), and (gray) for topic: (metabolomics) and topic: (diet). Timespan: all years. Indexes: SCI-EXPANDED, SSCI, A&HCI, CPCI-S, CPCI-SSH, ESCI, CCR-EXPANDED, IC. The higher results of the search topics among metabolomic papers were for “metabolomics with food” with 2253 papers, followed by the topic “metabolomics with diet” with 2168 papers, and finally “metabolomics with nutrition” with 995 papers. Moreover, the topic “metabolomics with food” has shown an exponential increase over the years with R2 = 7, higher than both “metabolomics with diet and nutrition” with an exponential trend of R2 = 5, pointing to a positive exponential growth of interest among scientists towards the exploration of food metabolomics. Further information about the published papers in the three topics is in the Supplementary Materials (Figure S1).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Schematic representation of metabolomics workflow in nutritional research.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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