February 22, 2017
By Shilpa Ravella
If you’re like most people, you may have a vague sense of how well you’re doing, nutritionwise — something like “pretty healthy” or “I could be better” — but unless you make all your own food and keep a meticulous diary of what you put in your mouth, you’re probably a little fuzzy on the details. After all, it’s hard to remember every single one of your meals and snacks, and harder still to know everything you’ve been eating and how much of it was good for you, or if your weekday smoothie-and-salad routine is enough to cancel out the weekend junk-food binges. Whether it’s intentionally or inadvertently, people tend to overreport their consumption of healthy foods and underreport unhealthy foods — a big problem for nutrition researchers trying to understand how our bodies respond to what we eat.
But it may not be a problem much longer. At some point down the road, your pee may be able to do the work for you: In a study published last month in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, scientists described a urine test that identifies chemical compounds that are produced when the body breaks down foods like red meat, chicken, fish, fruits, and vegetables. The test can also reveal how much sugar, fat, protein, and fiber someone has eaten. “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,” said lead study author Isabel Garcia-Perez, a medical research associate at Imperial College London.