Scientists at the Imperial College London Department of Medicine, in conjunction with Newcastle University and Aberystwyth University, in the United Kingdom have developed a urine test that can tell how healthy your diet.
A urine test that can reveal how healthy your meals are has been developed by UK scientists. They think it could be used to improve nutritional advice
They think it could be used to improve nutritional advice or in weight loss because people are notoriously bad at recording their own eating habits.
The test, detailed in the Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, detects chemicals made as food is processed by the body.
The research team believe it could be widely available within two years.
The urine samples are analysed to determine the structure of the chemicals floating around in it using a technique called a proton nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.
Urinary metabolite models developed in a highly controlled environment can classify groups of freeliving people into consumers of diets associated with lower or higher non-communicable disease risk on the basis of multivariate metabolite patterns. This approach enables objective monitoring of dietary patterns in population settings and enhances the validity of dietary reporting.
During each 3 day inpatient period, urine was collected daily over three timed periods: morning collection would rise by 50 μmol/L with each incremental rise in fruit intake (ie, pieces of fruit) in the experimental setting. With an SD of 40 μmol/L, assuming a power of 0·95 and an alpha of 0·05 to detect a diff erence of 50 μmol/L, we estimated that we would need 12 volunteers.
MCCV–PLS-DA models of 24 h urine spectra showed systematic diff erences between metabolic phenotypes of diets 1 and 4 that were refl ected in both the metabolic profi le (fi gure 2) and predicted scores (fi gure 3). From a total of 486 peaks (appendix p 3) in the mean ¹H-NMR spectrum, 19 identifi ed metabolites were present in signifi cantly higher concentrations in urine after consumption of diet 1 than after diet 4, and nine metabolites were present in signifi cantly increased concentrations after consumption of diet 4