Dietary effect on urinary thioethers

Urinary thioethers are a biomarker for reactive metabolites, which are deto xified via glutathione. We conducted this study to establish the effect of diet on a sample of persons we screened to exclude exposure from such subst ances. Our second objective was to develop a distribution curve to be used for comparison to exposed populations. Volunteers were sought who did not w ork or live in locations where known toxic exposures were likely to occur. We mainly recruited office personnel and secretariat staff. We screened sub jects for environmental exposures via a written questionnaire. Subjects gav e us an initial random urine specimen before they were placed on a diet low in thioethers. We then measured urinary thioethers on these specimens with a modified Ellman technique. We compared 126 paired results. Results demon strated that diet decreased urine thioether excretion in most cases (i.e., 75 of 126 had a decrease in thioethers). Initially, the difference in mean excretion at the time of prediet and postdiet, however, was not significant (p = .22). We removed 2 extreme outliers, the result of which was a signif icant difference in means (paired t test, p < .01). The standard deviation within each of the two groups did not differ significantly (p = .82).