Publication Date
11-1-2023
Journal
The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
DOI
10.1016/j.ajcnut.2023.08.018
PMID
37660929
PMCID
PMC10797554
PubMedCentral® Posted Date
11-11-2023
PubMedCentral® Full Text Version
Post-print
Published Open-Access
yes
Keywords
Humans, Female, Aged, Middle Aged, Male, Glutamine, Cross-Sectional Studies, Inflammation, Diet, Red Meat, Meat, Risk Factors, Red meat, inflammation, C-reactive protein, metabolomics, metabolome-wide association study, adiposity, BMI, biomarker
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Whether red meat consumption is associated with higher inflammation or confounded by increased adiposity remains unclear. Plasma metabolites capture the effects of diet after food is processed, digested, and absorbed, and correlate with markers of inflammation, so they can help clarify diet-health relationships.
OBJECTIVE: To identify whether any metabolites associated with red meat intake are also associated with inflammation.
METHODS: A cross-sectional analysis of observational data from older adults (52.84% women, mean age 63 ± 0.3 y) participating in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA). Dietary intake was assessed by food-frequency questionnaire, alongside C-reactive protein (CRP), interleukin-2, interleukin-6, fibrinogen, homocysteine, and tumor necrosis factor alpha, and untargeted proton nuclear magnetic resonance (
RESULTS: In analyses that adjust for BMI, neither processed nor unprocessed forms of red meat were associated with any markers of inflammation (all P > 0.01). However, when adjusting for BMI, unprocessed red meat was inversely associated with spectral features representing the metabolite glutamine (sentinel hit: β = -0.09 ± 0.02, P = 2.0 × 10
CONCLUSIONS: Our analyses were unable to support a relationship between either processed or unprocessed red meat and inflammation, over and above any confounding by BMI. Glutamine, a plasma correlate of lower unprocessed red meat intake, was associated with lower CRP levels. The differences in diet-inflammation associations, compared with diet metabolite-inflammation associations, warrant further investigation to understand the extent that these arise from the following: 1) a reduction in measurement error with metabolite measures; 2) the extent that which factors other than unprocessed red meat intake contribute to glutamine levels; and 3) the ability of plasma metabolites to capture individual differences in how food intake is metabolized.
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Biochemical Phenomena, Metabolism, and Nutrition Commons, Cardiology Commons, Cardiovascular Diseases Commons, Community Health and Preventive Medicine Commons, Dietetics and Clinical Nutrition Commons, Neurosciences Commons, Nutrition Commons