Urinary biomarkers of biofortified beef in healthy women explored by untargeted metabolomics

• Autor(a) principal: Lemos, Maria Teresa Oliveira
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/149574
• topic: beef; biofortification; biomarkers; human intervention; meat; metabolites; supplemented meat; untargeted LC-MS metabolomics; urine; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Médicas

Background: The prevalence of overweight and non-communicable chronic diseases is rising all over the globe. The high consumption of energy dense foods on behalf of high nutrient-dense food leads to lower intake of essential vitamins and minerals, such as vitamins D, E, K, and selenium. These micronutrients are related with numerous human vital functions and their deficiency is positively associated with higher risk of chronic diseases and mortality. Bovine meat is an important source of several micronutrients, with higher bioavailability compared to other plant-based foods. Meat consumption is expected to increase worldwide, therefore the biofortification of bull’s feeds can be an innovative strategy to increase population’s exposure to nutrients. Metabolomics techniques are capable to explore if the supplementation will ultimately lead to a higher micronutrient’s uptake in the body. Objective: The aim of the present study was to explore the differences on urinary metabolic fingerprint of women ingesting 300g of beef a day from bulls fed concentrate supplemented with extra vitamin D, E, K, and selenium compared to the regular composite feed. Methodology: A 32 days double-blind randomized cross-over human intervention study with two intervention periods, each for 6 days, was conducted in 35 healthy women. The participants were instructed to eat 300g of grinded beef meat as raw weight per day, either from bulls fed with regular control feed or meat supplemented with vitamin D, E, K and selenium, combined with their habitual diet. Fasting urine samples were collected in the morning before and after each intervention period and were analyzed by LC-MS untargeted metabolomics. Multivariate and univariate analysis were applied do identify discriminative features between the two interventions. Results: A total of 7 and 6 metabolites for positive and negative mode, respectively, were selected as discriminative of the two interventions. Among these, markers of overall meat intake, as well as markers of animal feed, markers related with the participants diet and inflammation-related markers were identified as upregulated or downregulated for the supplemented intervention. No markers specifically related to the biofortification were observed. Conclusions: Based on our methodology, the ingestion of biofortified beef did not results in a higher level of related metabolites when comparing the two interventions. Minor changes indicate that consequences of biofortification were very small. Further research is needed to understand if a higher increase of vitamin D, E, K, and selenium on animal´s feed composite can lead to different outcomes.