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Blood Biomarkers Prove Strong Role of Food in Type 2 Diabetes

A pioneering method developed at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden has demonstrated its potential in a large study, showing that metabolic fingerprints from blood samples could produce important new knowledge on the connection between food and health. The study finds that diet is one of the strongest predictors of type 2 diabetes risk in older women.

Researchers from Chalmers and Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden have found that several diet and nutrient biomarkers—molecules that can be measured in blood that are related to diet—are linked with the risk of developing type 2 diabetes and the future risk of developing the disease.

The study, published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, was carried out on 600 women from Gothenburg, where diagnosis of diabetes was made at the start of the study, when they were age 64, and again after 5½ years.

The results underline that diet is an important factor when it comes to the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, with fish, whole grains, vegetable oils, and good vitamin E status found to be protective against type 2 diabetes. Additional indications were that red meat and saturated fat increase the risk of developing the disease.

“What is really important is that we were able to reach these conclusions without having any additional information on diet from the subjects,” says lead author Otto Savolainen, a PhD student and research engineer at the division of food and nutrition science and the Chalmers Mass Spectrometry Infrastructure at Chalmers.

The blood samples were analyzed at Chalmers, where a unique metabolic fingerprint including many different diet biomarkers could be linked to each woman at the specific time the blood sample was taken. Using this method, it was possible for the first time to objectively determine the impact of key dietary components on future type 2 diabetes risk, as well as to find differences in dietary patterns between women with and without type 2 diabetes.

“Collecting information about diet can be complicated and time consuming and is always biased by what people remember and think they should report. Dietary biomarkers don’t have this problem and highlight that dietary recommendations to avoid red meat and saturated fat and increase intake of plant-based oils and whole grains do seem to hold true, at least in this group of women,” says associate professor Alastair Ross, PhD, responsible senior researcher at Chalmers in the division of food and nutrition science.

“The new method has allowed us to measure several markers of diet and nutrient status at the same time in a large number of people, which we believe is the first time this has been done,” he says.

Although the role of diet is often discussed as a preventive measure for developing type 2 diabetes, this new research provides strong support for dietary guidelines and underlines the importance of changing diet to improve health.

“New methods such as ours will help to improve how we measure diet and understand in more detail how dietary patterns relate to disease,” Ross says.

— Source: Chalmers University of Technology