Safety Assessment of Botanicals and Botanical Preparations Used as Ingredients in Food Supplements: Testing an European Food Safety Authority-Tiered ApproachProfiling Techniques in Nutrition and Food Research

High-throughput profiling technologies are now being exploited by the nutrition and food science disciplines. These technologies allow for the first time the interaction of foods and individual food constituents with the biological system to be defined on a molecular basis. However, both, academia and the food industry face a new challenge when applying transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics techniques in view of the huge datasets generated and the limited knowledge on human nutrition and responses to food. Applications of the techniques are almost unlimited when used in cell culture or animal studies and may be helpful in identifying individual biomarkers or clusters of markers linked to the activity of a dietary component. However, when taken into human trials for studying the responses to dietary interventions, the profiling techniques are limited by obtainable biosamples and the rather large variation generally found in humans. What seems important to be taken into consideration as well is the role of the gut microbiota that constitute a metagenome with quite different metabolic capacities and that with the production of distinct metabolites may substantially contribute to the biological effects of food constituents on human metabolic responses.