Dietary and health biomarkers-time for an update

FoodBAll is a project funded by the BIO-NH call under the Joint Programming Initiative, "a Healthy Diet for a Healthy Life" (grant number 529051002). The project is funded nationally by the respective Research Councils; the work was funded in part by a grant from the Danish Innovation Foundation (#4203-00002B) and a Semper Ardens grant from the Carlsberg Foundation to LOD, a postdoc grant from the University of Rome La Sapienza ("Borsa di studio per la frequenza di corsi o attivita di perfezionamento all'estero" erogata ai sensi della legge 398/89) to GP, a grant from the China Scholarship Council (201506350127) to QG, a grant from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (#ANR-14-HDHL-0002-02) to CM, and a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) to DSW.; In the dietary and health research area, biomarkers are extensively used for multiple purposes. These include biomarkers of dietary intake and nutrient status, biomarkers used to measure the biological effects of specific dietary components, and biomarkers to assess the effects of diet on health. The implementation of biomarkers in nutritional research will be important to improve measurements of dietary intake, exposure to specific dietary components, and of compliance to dietary interventions. Biomarkers could also help with improved characterization of nutritional status in study volunteers and to provide much mechanistic insight into the effects of food components and diets. Although hundreds of papers in nutrition are published annually, there is no current ontology for the area, no generally accepted classification terminology for biomarkers in nutrition and health, no systematic validation scheme for these biomarker classes, and no recent systematic review of all proposed biomarkers for food intake. While advanced databases exist for the human and food metabolomes, additional tools are needed to curate and evaluate current data on dietary and health biomarkers. The Food Biomarkers Alliance (FoodBAll) under the Joint Programming Initiative-A Healthy Diet for a Healthy Life (JPI-HDHL)-is aimed at meeting some of these challenges, identifying new dietary biomarkers, and producing new databases and review papers on biomarkers for nutritional research. This current paper outlines the needs and serves as an introduction to this thematic issue of Genes & Nutrition on dietary and health biomarkers