BACKGROUND: Accurate measurement of food intake is the cornerstone of understanding the links between diet and optimal health status or risk of disease. The utilization of metabolomics approaches is revolutionizing the field of dietary assessment by associating metabolic profiles with intake of specific foods or dietary patterns and/or investigating human health status in nutritional trials. Combining dietary biomarkers with conventional dietary assessment methods is considered a potential strategy for tackling the complexity of dietary exposure fingerprinting. SCOPE AND APPROACH: We discuss existing approaches among dietary assessment methods and dietary biomarkers. A combined approach taking into consideration data from dietary questionnaires with measurements of dietary biomarkers is emphasized. KEY FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS: Trends in novel strategies for improving dietary exposure assessment will be influenced by the discovery and validation of dietary exposure biomarkers. Among different strategies, multi-metabolite biomarker panels enable more reliable estimation of dietary exposure than does the traditional single-biomarker approach. Therefore, a combined approach using data from dietary questionnaires along with measurements of dietary biomarkers is considered an excellent strategy for improving dietary exposure assessment.