La métabolomique : de nouvelles perspectives en nutrition humaine

The major topic of current research in human nutrition is to improve the health of individuals and populations through the prevention of metabolic and age-related diseases. Metabolomics allows the measurement of a large fraction of the metabolites of a tissue or biofluids and is currently considered a promising approach to characterize the role of diet in the regulation of metabolic pathways underlying all biological processes. In recent years, metabolomics has been used to assess the nutritional status of individuals and to facilitate the discovery of new biomarkers associated with specific nutrients or metabolic dysfunctions. The specificity of metabolomic approaches can reveal the involvement until then unsuspected of metabolic pathways in different metabolic aberrations associated with nutritional status. Despite its current limitations, these metabolomic approaches provide complementary information to those produced by other “omics” technologies (transcriptomics, proteomics). They represent an innovative way contributing to a systemic approach that integrates different data sets and is considered relevant to study the complexity of food-health relationships.