Abstract
This abstract introduces the ongoing project “PlantIntake” and the accompanying validation study that will start in January 2024—current status and goals will be presented at the conference. PlantIntake, a JPI-funded project, aims to improve dietary assessment of plant foods, which currently relies on self-reported intake data that are prone to bias. High levels of plant foods in the diet are generally considered healthful, but there are also plant foods that are detrimental to health. Plant-based diet indices (PDIs), developed in the United States, have improved the understanding of the associations between plant food intake and health/disease outcomes. Within PlantIntake, European PDIs will be derived to suit European dietary habits and will include aspects of variety and processing. For dietary assessment, objective measurements are desired and may be achieved with biomarkers of food intake or respective panels of them. Such multi-biomarker panels (MBMPs) are an approach to overcome the limitations of single biomarkers to obtain a more robust dietary assessment. This approach is in line with the trend in epidemiology to look at dietary patterns rather than individual foods. An inventory of putative biomarkers of plant food intake was compiled as a basis for the development of a wide-coverage targeted metabolomics method for the analysis of blood and urine samples. By applying this metabolomics method to samples from European dietary studies available within the consortium, MBMPs reflecting plant food intake and adherence to European PDIs will be developed and subsequently validated in a controlled intervention study. In a 2-week intervention period, 60 participants will be randomized into four groups. Three of these groups will receive a diet low, medium, and high in healthful plant foods, while the fourth group will receive a diet high in unhealthful plant foods. The derived MBMPs will be validated for their reliability in assessing the quantity and quality of plant food intake. In addition, the effect of confounders (e.g., age and sex), as well as dose- and time-response aspects on biomarker concentrations, will be investigated.
Author Contributions
All authors contribute to the respective working package of the PlantIntake project and were involved in planning the intervention study. Conceptualization, all authors; project administration, M.J.R.; funding acquisition, S.S., B.M., A.B. and M.J.R. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding
This project has received funding from Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), represented by the Project Management Agency in the German Aerospace Center (DLR-PT) under the umbrella of the European Joint Programming Initiative “A Healthy Diet for a Healthy Life (JPI HDHL)” and the ERA-NET Cofund HDHL-INTIMIC (GA N° 727565 of the EU Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme).
Institutional Review Board Statement
The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and approved by the Ethics Committee of the State Medical Chamber of Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, Germany (protocol code F-2023-085; date of approval: 14.09.2023).
Informed Consent Statement
Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.
Data Availability Statement
No new data were created or analyzed in this study, yet. Data sharing is not applicable to this article.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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