Context: Accurately assessing dietary intake in children and adolescents is challenging due to the limitations of traditional self-reported methods. Metabolomics has emerged as a valuable tool for assessing the body's biochemical response to specific foods, food groups, or dietary patterns, thereby improving the evaluation of diet-health relationships. However, evidence on how diet influences metabolomic profiles in pediatric populations remains limited.
Objective: To evaluate the evidence on the relationship between nutritional interventions or habitual dietary intake and metabolites measured in blood or urine among children and adolescents.
Data sources: A systematic search was conducted in PubMed, Cochrane, and Embase databases up to September 2024.
Data extraction: This systematic review was conducted in accordance with the principles of the Cochrane Collaboration, and PRISMA guidelines were followed. Randomized clinical trials and observational studies in children and adolescents were included.
Data analysis: From 659 records, 8 studies met the inclusion criteria, involving 5992 participants across 12 countries. The included studies reported associations across 3 dietary categories: dietary patterns, food groups, and specific food ingredients. Both targeted and untargeted metabolomic analyses were used to identify diet-related biomarkers in blood and urine. Positive associations were observed between higher adherence to the Mediterranean diet and greater fruit and vegetable consumption with metabolites such as hippurate, trigonelline, and proline betaine. In contrast, higher intake of ultra-processed foods and adherence to vegan diets were inversely associated with branched-chain amino acids and aromatic amino acids such as tyrosine and docosahexaenoic acid.
Conclusion: This review identifies several metabolites consistently associated with specific dietary components across different studies in children and adolescents. These findings support the potential of metabolomics for validating dietary biomarkers and improving the accuracy of dietary assessment in pediatric populations. Although metabolomic markers reflect actual dietary intake, their implications for health outcomes remain to be explored.
Systematic review registration: PROSPERO registration no. CRD42024506437.
Keywords: adolescents; biomarkers; children; diet; metabolomics.
© The Author(s) 2026. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Life Sciences Institute.