Are your meals made up of home-cooked dinners or drive-thru and takeout? British scientists say they’ve developed a five-minute urine test that could tell if you have a healthy diet.
The quick test looks at how much fat, sugar, fibre and protein you’re eating by measuring markers created by the breakdown of foods such as red meat, chicken, fish and fresh produce.
The test, created by scientists out of Imperial College London, Newcastle University and Aberystwyth University, is still in its early stages. But the doctors hope it’ll help track patients’ diets and even be weaved into weight-loss programs.
Right now, studies rely on people’s self-reported eating habits, leaving room for error. People tend to exaggerate how often they’re eating fruits or vegetables, for example.
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“A major weakness in all nutrition and diet studies is that we have no true measure of what people eat. We rely solely on people keeping logs of their daily diets – but studies suggest around 60 per cent of people misreport what they eat to some extent. This test could be the first independent indicator of the quality of a person’s diet – and what they are really eating,” Dr. Gary Frost, the study’s lead author, said.
It just needs some refining, Dr. Isabel Garcia-Perez, a study co-author, said.
“This will eventually provide a tool for personalized dietary monitoring to help maintain a healthy lifestyle. We’re not at the stage yet where the test can tell us a person ate 15 chips yesterday and two sausages but it’s on the way,” she explained.
The team hopes their test could be available to the public in just two years. It’d be as simple as sending a urine sample to your doctor or dietitian’s office. In the long run, the scientists hope to get rid of the middle man – consumers could just do the test in their homes without laboratory involvement.
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In their testing, the doctors recruited 19 healthy volunteers and had them follow four different diets ranging from very healthy to very unhealthy. They followed these diets on a strict routine for three days while in a London lab. Doctors collected their urine samples three times a day.
After that, the scientists assessed the urine tests for hundreds of compounds – called metabolites – that are produced when certain foods are broken down in the body.
The compounds point to specific foods, from red meat, chicken, and fish to citrus fruits, grapes and leafy green vegetables.
With these compound profiles in tow, the researchers created a baseline for what a healthy, balanced diet would look like based on test results.
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They tested the accuracy of their baseline on a previous study with 225,000 volunteers’ urine samples and daily diet records.
The researchers’ full findings were published this week in the journal Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology.
carmen.chai@globalnews.ca
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