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Integration of modern technologies to advance dietary assessment

Nature Food volume 7, pages 17–26 (2026) Cite this article

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Abstract

Diet is a key determinant of human and planetary health, but accurately measuring dietary intake remains challenging. Traditional self-reporting tools are imprecise, compromising our ability to accurately link diets with health outcomes. Modern technologies, including smartphone apps, image-based methods and biomarkers of food intake (BFIs), offer promise but bring their own caveats. App- and image-based methods reduce bias and reporting burden, but remain partly self-reported, and are thus prone to errors similar to those of traditional methods. Omics-based BFIs (that is, metabolites, food-related DNA or food proteins) are objective measures derived from biological samples; however, they mostly reflect recent intake, and require careful sampling alignment to estimate habitual diets. Here we discuss the drawbacks and opportunities for all dietary tools and propose strategies to integrate technologies along with multisampling for longitudinal measurements, for a new era in dietary assessment that can clarify the impact of diets, dietary components and dietary behaviour on human and planetary health.

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Fig. 1: Comparison of dietary assessment tools to measure food intake.
Fig. 2: Integration of technologies to speed up development and validation.

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Acknowledgements

C.C. thanks the British Nutrition Foundation for the runner-up Drummond Early Career Scientist award. We thank the NuGO Office (https://www.nugo.org/) for facilitating the NuGO webinar that consolidated some of the points included in this Review, and M.-L. Puhlmann for her help with figure visualization. Research reported in this publication was supported, in part, by the Novo Nordisk Foundation (NNF19OC0056246: PRIMA—towards Personalized dietary Recommendations based on the interaction between diet, Microbiome and Abiotic conditions in the gut) to C.C., by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under award no. R01DK133468 (to S.M.G.), and by the Austrian Science Fund, Cluster of Excellence COE7 (https://doi.org/10.55776/COE7) to C.D.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports, University of Copenhagen, Frederiksberg, Denmark

    Catalina Cuparencu

  2. Diagnostic and Research Institute of Hygiene, Microbiology and Environmental Medicine, Medical University of Graz, Graz, Austria

    Christian Diener

  3. Department of Life Sciences, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK

    Thomas Wilson

  4. Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle, WA, USA

    Sean M. Gibbons

  5. Department of Bioengineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Sean M. Gibbons

  6. Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Sean M. Gibbons

  7. eScience Institute, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Sean M. Gibbons

  8. Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Sean M. Gibbons

  9. Division of Human Nutrition and Health, Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Desiree A. Lucassen

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  1. Catalina Cuparencu
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  2. Christian Diener
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  3. Thomas Wilson
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  4. Sean M. Gibbons
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  5. Desiree A. Lucassen
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Contributions

C.C. contributed to conceptualization, writing the original draft, overall editing, primary responsibility for the final content, figures, and project management. C.D. contributed to writing the original draft and overall editing. T.W. contributed to the overall editing. S.M.G. contributed to writing the original draft and the overall editing. D.A.L. contributed to writing the original draft, the overall editing, and had primary responsibility for the final content. All authors contributed substantially to discussions around the content of the Review, and finally reviewed, revised and accepted the final version of the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Catalina Cuparencu.

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S.M.G. is a paid member of the Scientific Advisory Board for Thorne, Inc. Thorne had no part in the conception, writing or publication of this work. The other authors declare no competing interests.

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Cuparencu, C., Diener, C., Wilson, T. et al. Integration of modern technologies to advance dietary assessment. Nat Food 7, 17–26 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-025-01290-0

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