How much ultra-processed food to count is always dependent on dietary questionnaire and personal honesty.

But the US National Institute of Health (NIH), the world’s largest medical research body researchers may have found a more purposeful way: by reading it in your blood and urine.

In a new study published in Plos Medicine, scientists have developed that they say a poly-mentabolite score, a biomarker-based device that can guess how much a person’s energy comes from ultra-produced foods.

These include packaged snacks, soft drinks, ready-to-eat food, and other industrially manufactured calorie-dense products and nutrient-poor products.

This can be a success for nutrition research, which is struggling with impurities of long-reported diet data.

Principal investigator and researcher of National Cancer Institute, Dr. Ericka Loftfield said, “The limitations of self-reported diet are well known. With metabolomics, we can get closer to an objective remedy for food intake and also understand how diet can affect health.”

All about this score

The NIH team saw blood and urine samples for 12 months from two different groups: an observation study of 718 old American adults, and a clinical trial where 20 participants were fed to two separate diets, one high (80%) and a completely free (0%) ultra-prostitutes, for two weeks.

Researchers found hundreds of small substances in blood and urine, called metabolites, which were associated with the ultra-sensitive food eaten by a person.

Using machine learning, he created a special score, called a poly-metabolite score that may explain how a person’s diet was processed.

These scores clearly showed the difference that when someone was eating mostly processed food and when they were not, the study authors said.

Why does it matter

Dietary health risks are high in ultra-related foods such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, and even some cancers are well documented.

But determining how much people really eat is difficult, especially when the memory-based food log or questionnaire. People forgot, forget the size of the under-report or wrong part.

This biomarker-based equipment can make large-scale population studies more reliable and help to highlight strong relationships between diet and disease.

Score limits

While the conclusions are promising, researchers take precautions that the current results are mostly based on older American adults.

The score still needs to be validated with different eating habits in more diverse populations and levels of ultra-like food intake.

In addition, the study did not check if these scores are associated with diseases like cancer or diabetes. This is something that scientists want to study further, to see if people with high-scores (meaning they eat more ultra-managed food) are more likely to receive these diseases.

For now, however, the study is a step towards more accurate nutritional science and perhaps one day, doctors do not need to ask what you eat.

There may be an answer in your body already.