Author

Nikos Stratakis et. al.

Abstract

Urinary metabolic profiling is a promising powerful tool to reflect dietary intake and can help understand metabolic alterations in response to diet quality. Here, we used H NMR spectroscopy in a multicountry study in European children and identified a common panel of 4 urinary metabolites (hippurate, N-methylnicotinic acid, urea, and sucrose) that was predictive of Mediterranean diet adherence (KIDMED) and ultra-processed food consumption and also had higher capacity in discriminating children’s diet quality than that of established sociodemographic determinants. This knowledge can provide mechanistic evidence of common biological pathways that characterize healthy and unhealthy dietary patterns, and diet-related molecular alterations that could associate to metabolic disease.