Blood and urine markers can reveal the quantity of ultra -approved foods that we eat

Blood and urine molecules can reveal the amount of energy that a person consumes ultra -approval food, a key step to understand the impact of products that represent nearly 60% of the American diet, according to a new study.

This is the first time that scientists have identified organic markers who may indicate the higher or lower supply of food, which are linked to a multitude of health problems, said Erikka Loftfield, researcher of the National Cancer Institute who led the study published Tuesday in the journal Plos Medicine.

“This can potentially give us some clues about what the underlying biology could be between an ultra-secured food association and a result for health,” said Loftfield.

Ultra -approved foods – sweet cereals, sodas, shavings, frozen and more pizzas – are products created by industrial processes with ingredients such as additives, colors and preservatives that are not found in domestic kitchens. They are omnipresent in the United States and elsewhere, but studying their health impacts is difficult because it is difficult to follow precisely what people eat.

Typical nutritional studies are based on recall: ask people what they ate for a certain period. But such reports are notoriously unreliable because people do not remember everything they have eaten, or they record it in an inaccurate way.

“There is both a more objective measurement and potentially also a more precise measure,” said Loftfield.

To create the new scores, Loftfield and his colleagues examined data from an existing study of more than 1,000 older American adults who were members of the AARP. More than 700 of them provided samples of blood and urine, as well as detailed food recall reports, collected over a year.

Scientists have found that hundreds of metabolites – digestion products and other processes – corresponded to the percentage of energy that a person consumes from ultra -development foods. From these, they have designed a score of 28 blood markers and up to 33 urine markers who were reliably predicted the ultra-proposed food intake in people consuming typical diets.

“We found this signature which was somehow predictive of this food model rich in ultra-forese food and not only in a specific food here and there,” she said.

Some of the markers, including two amino acids and a carbohydrates, have appeared at least 60 times on 100 test iterations. A marker has shown a potential link between a diet rich in ultra -approved food and type 2 diabetes, the study revealed.

To confirm the results, Loftfield has measured the rating tool with the participants in a study by the National Institutes of Health 2019 in ultra -forecoes.

In this study, 20 adults went to live a month in a NIH center. They received ultra -proposed and unprocessed food diets matching calories, sugar, fats, fibers and macronutrients for two weeks each and were invited to eat as much as they wanted.

The Loftfield team found that they could use metabolite scores to find out when individual participants ate a lot of ultra -forese food and when they did not eat these foods.

The results suggested that the markers were “valid at the individual level,” said Loftfield.

It is still early research, but the identification of markers of blood and urine to predict the consumption of ultra -proposed food is “a major scientific advance,” said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, director of the Food is Medicine Institute of Toft University, which was not involved in the study.

“With more research, these metabolic signatures can start to disentangle the biological ways and damage to the UPF as well as differences in the health effects of specific food groups of the UPF, treatment methods and additives,” he said.

Loftfield said that it hoped to apply the tool to existing studies where blood and urine samples are available to follow, for example, the effect of the consumption of ultra -approved food on the risk of cancer.

At a time when support for government research is being reduced, funding remains uncertain.

“There is a lot of interest at all levels – scientifically, public interest, political interest – in the question of: does ultra -procent food have an impact on health and, in the affirmative, how?” She said. “How can we finance the studies that must be done to answer these questions timely?”

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