1H NMR spectra were acquired in a Bruker 600 MHz AVANCE II NMR spectrometer (Bruker Biospin, Rheinstetten, Germany) operating at a 1H frequency of 600.13 MHz and a temperature of 298 K. A one-dimensional (1D) Carr–Purcell–Merboom–Gill (CPMG, RD-90-(τcp-180-τcp)-acquisition) with water suppression and a total spin–spin relaxation delay of 320 ms was used to attenuate the broad signals from proteins and lipoproteins due to their short transverse relaxation time. The 1H NMR spectrum for each sample consisted of 80 scans with the following parameters: spectral width = 12335.5 Hz, spectral size = 65,536 points, pulse width (PW) = 30° (12.7 μs), and relaxation delay (RD) = 2.0 s. The FIDs were Fourier transformed with LB = 0.3 Hz.
The 1H NMR spectra were manually phased, and the baseline was set by using the software Topspin 3.2. Integrations of water resonance (4.70–5.15 ppm) in the spectra of aqueous samples were excluded. The metabolites were normalized to the total integrated spectral area (−0.55–8.55 ppm) for aqueous samples. The dataset was log-transformed and Pareto-scaled (mean-centered and divided by the square root of the standard deviation of each variable) before statistical analysis.