Urine Tests for Nutrition Health

Soon, a trip to the bathroom may tell a lot about well (or poorly) someone is eating with urine tests for nutrition health. In research funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and Health Data Research UK, scientists have developed a quick urine test that measures the quality of a person’s diet and produces an individual’s unique urine “fingerprint.”

To test this process, researchers isolated 46 different metabolites in the urine of 1,848 people in the U.S. They then associated the metabolites with the types of foods or nutrients in the diet. Metabolites are now considered an objective indicator of diet quality and are produced as different foods are digested by the body. In short, they provide a more in-depth understanding of how our bodies process and use food at the molecular level.

This can be a more accurate way to gauge diet quality than relying on a person’s dietary recall. For instance, certain metabolites correlated with alcohol, meat, sugar, fruit, calcium and vitamin C intake. As reported in Nature Food, various metabolites were also linked with health conditions. Compounds found in urine such as formate and sodium (an indicator of salt intake), for instance, are linked with obesity and high blood pressure.

The end goal here is to better understand how different patterns of diet-derived metabolites in the urine are associated with health outcomes and allow people to receive eating advice tailored to their individual biological make-up—all as determined by simple urine tests for nutrition health. The research found that people who followed the same diet can end up with different metabolites in their system. That means eating red meat may result in unfavorable metabolites for heart health for one individual but not for someone else.

See also: Hair Samples Reveal American Diet