Dietary Intakes of Cysteine, Glutamate, Proline, and Tryptophan Are Associated with Hypertension Risk in Chinese Children and Adolescents: A National Cross-Sectional Study Integrating Machine Learning

Why It Matters

Early‑life hypertension drives long‑term cardiovascular disease and health‑care costs; pinpointing modifiable dietary amino acids offers a precise lever for public‑health nutrition strategies.

Key Takeaways

• Study of 12,187 Chinese youths links specific amino acids to hypertension.
• Cysteine, glutamic acid, and proline double odds of high blood pressure.
• Tryptophan intake cuts hypertension risk by roughly 50%.
• LightGBM model predicts hypertension with AUC 0.79 using amino‑acid data.
• Findings support amino‑acid‑focused nutrition policies for youth hypertension prevention.

Pulse Analysis

Childhood hypertension is emerging as a global health concern, with prevalence rising sharply in China’s rapidly urbanizing population. Traditional risk‑factor models have focused on macronutrients and sodium, leaving a knowledge gap around the role of individual amino acids. By leveraging the China Children and Lactating Women Nutrition and Health Surveillance data, this study provides the first large‑scale, nationally representative evidence that specific dietary amino acids directly influence blood‑pressure trajectories in youths, underscoring the need to broaden nutritional surveillance beyond calories and protein totals.

The research integrates classical epidemiology with advanced machine‑learning techniques. After rigorous feature selection via the Boruta algorithm, four models were trained, and LightGBM emerged as the top performer (AUC 0.793). SHAP analysis highlighted cysteine, glutamic acid, proline and tryptophan as the most influential predictors, aligning with multivariate logistic regression results. These findings illustrate how AI‑driven analytics can uncover nuanced dietary‑health relationships that conventional methods might miss, offering a scalable blueprint for future nutrigenomics investigations.

From a policy perspective, the identified amino‑acid signatures present actionable targets for dietary guidelines, school meal programs, and food‑industry reformulation. Encouraging lower cysteine, glutamic acid and proline intake while promoting tryptophan‑rich foods could become a cost‑effective strategy to mitigate early hypertension and its downstream economic burden. Stakeholders should consider incorporating amino‑acid profiling into nutrition monitoring systems and funding longitudinal trials to validate causal pathways, thereby translating these insights into measurable public‑health gains.