What would happen if you could measure your metabolism and get a prescription for a "tailored" diet? The "metabonomics" method offers customized solutions, according to the patient's medical condition
Gunjan Sinha, Scientific American
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There is no one-size-fits-all diet. Some people will swallow cabbage soup for a week and lose only a few grams, while others, subject to the same spartan regimen, will lose five kilograms. But what would happen if you could measure your metabolism and receive a prescription for a "tailored" diet?
This is exactly what metabonomics can do. This is one of the branches that emerged recently to the "omics" revolution - following genomics (genes) and proteomics (proteins). Following the understanding that certain diseases, such as obesity, are in fact syndromes of metabolic problems, situations in which several biochemical pathways that cause complex symptoms work mutually, the metabolic test came and offers a way to measure health throughout life. Moreover, the technology of metabonomics may detect disorders in the exchange of substances even before the symptoms. Such a test could help people choose for themselves regimes for nutrition and physical fitness development that are "tailored" to their personal metabolic state.
Alan J. Higgins of Icoria, a company based in a research industrial park in North Carolina, explains: "metabonomics provides the functional component" that is not always apparent in the analysis of gene or protein composition. Changes in gene expression do not necessarily affect health, as the internal regulatory mechanisms may compensate for this. Also, the mutual control between genes and proteins only sometimes causes a total change in the metabolic pathways. Metabonomics examines the living being as a single system and thus tries to unite genomics with proteomics. "We monitor these changes at the downstream end," says Higgins.
Metabolic research
Every moment the human body excretes thousands of metabolic substances, whose concentration can be measured in urine, plasma and various body tissues. This can be done using conventional technologies, such as mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Biochemists thus measure the toxicity to human cells of drugs or environmental pollutants. However, these measurements pose a challenge: how to interpret the mountains of information obtained from them.
The boom in bioinformatics helped solve the problem. Scientists can now analyze and examine metabolites in greater detail than before and conduct comparative studies from which more can be learned. Three years ago, for example, the London company Metabometrix showed that it is possible to diagnose arteriosclerosis (arthrosclerosis) using high-frequency radio waves returned from a blood sample. The radio waves measured the sample's magnetic properties and a computer program produced the pattern that revealed and identified the disease.
In the future, it may be possible to chart a profile of a metabolic disease even before symptoms appear. Researchers at BG Medicine from Massachusetts tested mice that had been genetically engineered to develop atherosclerosis when fed a high-fat diet. The scientists fed these mice a diet with a moderate level of fat and after nine weeks they checked the level of fat in the liver and plasma compared to a control group. In the mice that underwent the genetic modification, a higher level of certain fatty metabolites was found, even though they looked completely healthy.
Today, of course, there are already biochemical markers that warn of disease, such as a high cholesterol level, but these are not enough. "A single biochemical marker provides information," says Jan van der Griff of BG Medicine, "but to tell the whole story typical biochemical patterns are needed." Van der Griff believes that many diseases have a metabolic "signature" that can be identified even before a marker such as cholesterol rises. The challenge is to identify the metabolic patterns. This is not an easy task. There is still no clear understanding of the normal human metabolism, let alone an understanding of the metabolism that is not normal.
Genetic decoding - very easy
Compared to that, "gene sequencing is a breeze," says Jose M. Ordoves, director of the Nutrition and Genomics Laboratory at Taft University. He clarifies that the researcher engaged in deciphering the DNA sequence is dealing with only four components (A, C, T and G), while "in metabonomics there is a technological base that measures things in different ways. We are talking about thousands of ingredients."
In order to make progress in research, it is necessary, according to the scientists, to establish the "metabonome" of the person - a concept equivalent to the human genome. But, according to Ordovs, the actions in the field are not coordinated and there is a lack of budget. He estimates that in order to realize this goal, metabolic analyzes must be conducted for half a million people or even more.
Yet Ordovs continues to move forward, thumbs down. In a joint project with "Metabometrics" he tests several thousand people, some of them suffering from severe metabolic diseases such as obesity and some of them healthy, in order to diagnose how the extreme cases differ from the norm. He will also investigate whether diet and exercise adapted to the patient's unique metabolic profile can bring his weight down to a normal weight and prevent early deterioration to health problems. In the future, maybe we'll stop looking at the amount of calories, fat, and carbohydrates on food labels, and start matching them to our metabolic type.
