The metabolic and physiologic responses to healthy dietary habits and physical exercise have become an increasingly interesting research area, since equilibrated diet and regular physical activity are commonly recommended for their antioxidant capacity and for the prevention and treatment of several disorders as insulin resistance, dyslipidemia, obesity, and hypertension that may result in cardiovascular disease and type II diabetes.Nutritional and exercise-induced responses and the biological mechanisms that explain these associations have been tackled by several researchers using metabolomic approaches that have emerged as a powerful tool to comprehensively evaluate individual metabolic signatures, analyzing metabolome composition in serum, urine, stool, or tissue samples.The overview of the wide range of metabolites related to dietary and to physical training interventions reported from numerous human or animal studies endorses the complexity for assessing metabolic changes and compound identification, and a combination of targeted and non-targeted global profiling studies is recommended for increasing the understanding of nutrition and exercise metabolic mechanisms.The present protocol attempt to identify variations in human blood circulating metabolites with a multiplatform global analysis based on LC-MS, GC-MS, and NMR, combining targeted and untargeted strategies, to complete the holistic understanding of the serum metabolome.
Keywords: Diet; Gas chromatography; Liquid chromatography; Mass spectrometry; Metabolomics; Nuclear magnetic resonance; Nutrition; Physical training.