Abstract
Nutritional epidemiology plays a critical role in understanding the relationship between diet and risk of chronic diseases. With recent advances in omics technologies including genomics, metabolomics, proteomics, and metagenomics, there are new opportunities to explore biological mechanisms underlying diet, metabolic pathways, and health outcomes. In my presentation, I will discuss our efforts to incorporate omics technologies especially high throughput metabolomics into our large cohort studies including the Nurses' Health Study and Health Professionals' Follow-up Study as well as the PREDIMED trial. The integration of omics data in nutritional epidemiology holds great promises in identifying novel biomarkers for dietary intakes and predicting future disease risk. The repeated measures of diet enable us to examine long-term relationships between dietary factors and chronic disease risk and whether these associations are mediated or modified by individuals' metabolic profiles. These analyses have the potential to facilitate more effective precision or personalized nutrition interventions. Continued efforts and collaboration are necessary to fully leverage the potential of omics data in nutritional epidemiologic research and chronic disease prevention.
