(P12-26-26) Identification of Pulse-Enriched Glycans Associated With Metabolic Health in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2003-2023

Objectives: This study aimed to estimate dietary glycan intake and assess associations between pulse food glycans and metabolic health including insulin resistance (IR), metabolic syndrome (MetS), and chronic inflammation (C-reactive protein, CRP).

Methods: Data from adults in NHANES 2003-2023 were used in this cross-sectional, observational study. Low pulse intake was defined as not meeting the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2020-2025 recommendations for beans, peas, and lentils. Insulin resistance was defined as HOMA-IR ≥ 2.5. Low and high inflammation was based on CRP ≤1 and ≥3 mg/L, respectively. Metabolic syndrome was determined as having any 3 of 5 criteria according to National Cholesterol Education Program guidelines. After applying exclusion criteria, sample sizes were 8,605 for insulin resistance, 8,307 for metabolic syndrome, and 8,456 for C-reactive protein. Dietary glycan intake was estimated by disaggregating 24-hr diet recalls into ingredient-level foods and mapping ingredients to the Davis Food Glycopedia 2.0. Random forest classifiers with 10-fold cross validation were used to predict each metabolic outcome from the glycan intake features, total dietary fiber, and person-specific covariates. Feature importances were evaluated using SHaply Additive exPlanations (SHAP).

Results: Pulse foods were high sources ( >20% of total intake) of nine non-digestible dietary glycans including stachyose, verbascose, and raffinose. Classification performance assessed by Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve was 0.7926 for IR vs non-IR, 0.7999 for MetS vs no MetS, and 0.8163 for high vs low CRP. SHAP analysis showed several pulse enriched glycans as top features, outranking total dietary fiber. Higher intake of pulse-enriched glycans were associated with an increased probability of predicting low CRP, non-IR, and no MetS. Some pulse-enriched glycans had a dose-response with the probability of predicting non-IR and no MetS.

Conclusions: Pulse foods are a major source of non-digestible glycans, reflecting their high fiber content. Many pulse-enriched glycans were more important relative to total dietary fiber indicating specific pulse derived non-digestible carbohydrates may be more potent mediators of disease risk.

Funding Sources: This work was supported by the United States Department of Agriculture Pulse Crop Health Initiative.