Next-Generation Nutritional Biomarkers to Guide Better Health Care

There are only a few areas in human nutrition and metabolism where biomarkers are routinely used to predict health and functional outcome. For instance, of the four major nutritional deficiencies, only iron deficiency can be precisely diagnosed by employing biomarkers. They therefore play a limited role in research and decision making, and intervention strategies are still mostly targeted at the population level. What is needed at this stage are biomarkers that are predictive of later functional