Nutri-omics signatures in mets patients

Globally, populations’s nutritional establish the link between human health and sustainability. Current trends in food quality/choices are inappropriate for health. In the last decades, societies increased their meat, sugar and fat consumption as they became whelthier, and this was parallelled by an increase in the risk of developing heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancers and a variety of other “Western-like” public health problems.  Metabolic syndrome (MetS) is a cluster of conditions, increasing the risk of cardiovascular diseases and type 2 diabetes. They include increased blood pressure, high blood sugar, excess body fat around the waist, and abnormal cholesterol or triglyceride levels. Exploring the association between MetS, diet patterns and food quality together with metabolic biochemical parameters and how that association can change according to different food choices has now became one of the most important question to address in the field of non-communicable diseases.

Adherence to the Mediterranean diet together with anthropometric measurements and biochemical changes will identify subgroups of patients with MetS. Moreover, thanks to a multiomic approach, encompassing genomic, lipidomic, metabolic and oral/gut metagenomic analysis, a metabolic identity card of each patient will be generated. The whole set of data will be cross-analysed and the newly generated data will be crucial to identify diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers that will help stratifying patients and guide appropriate nutritional interventions. Improved dietary habits according to the Mediterranean nutritional pattern, able to supply energy according to the individuals’ nutritional needs (e.g. targeting phenotypes based on response to food intake) through sustainable and affordable foods and preparations and also the development of tools for the prediction at individual level of response to food intake, metabolism and microbial changes will be implemented.

The associations between anthropometric, and metabolic status, genetic, lipidomic, metabolomic and gut microbial signatures in patients affected by MetS with different severity are emerging. Data generated by omics measurements and their cross-analysis with the hemo-metabolic status of patients affected by MetS will aid the identification of novel predictive tools and biomarkers for the identification of specific phenotypes and the design of appropriate nutritional intervention strategies. The newly generated data will allow the identification of specific patient subgroups who will putatively benefit from personalised dietary advice based on the Mediterranean nutritional pattern, designed also in view of environment and social sustainability. At least one new predictive approach for individual response to food intake will be developed and validated.