Decrease your salt intake. Eat a hearty breakfast. Opt for more veggies.
Although many people are familiar with these sorts of common nutritional recommendations, they may also struggle to put them into practice. Some individuals even respond to such guidance as stressful or threatening to their eating routine—and experience a respective spike in their levels of cortisol or testosterone.
Now, a new research collaboration at the University of Illinois aims to quantify the biological markers of those stress and threat responses and help reduce or counteract them.
Family Resiliency Center Director Jacinda Dariotis and FRC Collaboratory affiliates Brian Cunningham, professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Jenna Riis, assistant professor of health and kinesiology, are engineering a device to measure the hormonal responses associated with healthy eating decision-making. The portable device will quantify salivary hormones on-site to allow for the efficient communication of personal health data on the spot.
“One barrier to understanding an individual’s response to a personalized nutrition plan has been technological,” said Riis, an expert in salivary bioscience. “Previously, salvia samples have needed to be immediately frozen, transported to a laboratory and processed remotely, without those results being communicated to the participant. But the rapid evaluation of biomarkers in the field has the potential to transform personalized nutrition research and practice by allowing for real-time return of results to participants. Along with this increased engagement with participants, we hope to improve the personalization process and see changes in their attitudes and decision-making regarding eating behaviors.”
The study measures cortisol and testosterone levels at four discrete moments: initially, as a baseline; at the time of a stressful exposure; twenty minutes after that stressful moment, when cortisol and testosterone are likely to peak; and then twenty minutes beyond that, during the recovery period. The proof-of-concept study is funded in part by a seed grant from Illinois’ Personalized Nutrition Initiative, which supports transdisciplinary collaborations that address how nutrition modulates health and disease across the lifespan and translate that information to clinical care and the public.
“The development of this novel device has enormous translational potential,” said Dariotis. “Delivering health information on the spot builds community trust and reduces hesitancy around research enrollment. A community participant who might be skeptical about freezing, transporting, processing and storing their biological samples is more likely to enroll in a study when they can see the data analysis taking place in real-time.”
The device’s portability and rapid sample processing also increases its translational impact among some of the hardest-to-reach community participants.
“Offering personalized health information on-site is an ideal setup for research dissemination and translation,” said Dariotis. “The moments when we are working with community participants in-person are the best opportunities for promoting the adoption of healthier behaviors and decision-making.”
The success of the study could open the door to the measurement of biomarkers related to other social and behavioral research questions—for example, to a hormone that pertains to appetite, like leptin, or to inflammatory markers like tumor necrosis factor-alpha or interleukins. Ultimately, it promises to integrate salivary bioscience into new clinical and public health-related fields, helping to inform effective prevention and intervention strategies.
The project’s combination of biological, engineering and public health approaches is representative of the work that FRC strives to foster, said Dariotis.
“The device’s engineering has the potential to solve a particularly difficult problem in biological sampling, while its real-time processing will engage and empower community members in their own health decisions,” she said. “I’m excited to see where this work can go.”