The foodomics approach for discovering biomarkers of food consumption in nutrition studies

•Estimate intakes of foods and nutrients lack of harmonized methodologies for their assessment.•Biomarkers for food intake are requested to evaluate the compliance of volunteers to the dietary intervention.•The only possibility to define the whole metabolome is the non-targeted metabolite profiling.•Foodomics addresses the effort of the omic approach toward the holistic definition of food.

Food consumption surveys are often used to evaluate both the compliance of volunteers to the dietary intervention, and the effectiveness of a nutrient/bioactive compound. However, there is the need of selecting, within the whole food metabolome, specific dietary biomarkers as more objective measures of dietary exposure. At present, the only possibility to manage the enormous number of compounds constituting the metabolome is the non-targeted metabolite profiling as a tool of the foodomics approach. On the other hand, targeted analyses on a predetermined set of clinical biomarkers can provide important mechanistic information. Both targeted and non-targeted analyses should be considered complementary to each other, the use of the former or the latter depending on the specific scientific question at hand.