Nexus between dairy consumption and metabolic syndrome

Shifts in dietary pattern, food composition and processing as well as a modification in physical activity are collectively known as “nutritional transition”. In the context of deleterious behavior, this transition has led to an energy imbalance not only in the Western world but also in emerging countries with an increasing prevalence of overweight and obesity. Obesity and especially abdominal obesity is one of the metabolic risk factors to be diagnosed with metabolic syndrome. For a long time, research on the relationship between diet and health has considered the impact of isolated nutrients or food compounds and often in experimental conditions far from the complexity of the real diet. The development of high-throughput technologies (transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics) which permit to generate large-scale analyses can now offer the possibility of characterizing global alterations associated with disease conditions, food characterization and nutritional exposition, are an entire part of foodomics approaches. In the human diet, dairy products were often associated with the development of cardiovascular diseases, in particular because of their content in saturated fatty acids. However, calcium, and lipid content vary among samples, which may explain that conflicting results have been published. However, studies published recently have shown that while consumption a "western diet" is related to the incidence of metabolic syndrome, consumption of dairy products seems to be protective. Most of the studies so far carried out were based on self-reported consumption of dairy products (food frequency questionnaires), but recently fatty acids such as 15:0, 17:0, and trans-16:1n-7 present in blood phospholipids were proposed as potential biomarkers of dairy products consumption. This is still under debate and need further studies using integrative approaches. All the new data published on the identification of potential biomarkers and on the meta-analyses of prospective studies will be presented. Investigations using a foodomics approach to further clarify the controversial data so far published about the relation between consumption of dairy products and the incidence of metabolic syndrome will be discussed