SOURCE: Harvard School of Public Health
A newly identified “metabolic signature” can evaluate an individual’s adherence and metabolic response to the Mediterranean diet and help predict future risk of developing cardiovascular disease (CVD), according to new research led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health with collaborators from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Spain. The findings were published online in the European Heart Journal on May 14, 2020.
They noted that ability for the signature to determine adherence and metabolic response to the Mediterranean diet, and to predict future CVD risk, were highly reproducible across all the study populations despite the fact that individuals living in Spain and in the U.S. have different dietary habits, lifestyles, and environmental exposures.
“This study is the first to develop a metabolic signature for the Mediterranean diet based on comprehensive metabolomic profiles. It demonstrates that the level of dietary adherence and individual’s response to diet can be objectively measured,” said Liming Liang, associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Harvard Chan School and co-senior author of the paper.
