Western diet may increase risk of gut inflammation, infection
According to a study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Cleveland Clinic, eating a Western-style diet may damage the immune system in the gut, increasing the risk of infection and inflammatory bowel disease.
Liu TC, Kern JT, Jain U, Sonnek NM, Xiong S, Simpson KF, VanDussen KL, Winkler ES, Haritunians T, Lu Q, Sasaki Y, Storer C, Diamond MS, Head RD, McGovern DPB Stappenbeck TS Western diet induces Paneth cell defects via FXR and type I interferons. Cell Hosts and Microbes. 18 May 2021. doi: 10.1016 / j.chom.2021.04.004
Commentary
In this study of mice and humans, researchers showed that a diet high in sugar and fat damaged Paneth cells, immune cells in the gut that help reduce inflammation.
The study explains that when these "panate cells" are not functioning properly, the gut becomes more prone to inflammation, increasing the risk of inflammatory bowel disease and impairing effective control of disease-causing microbes.
As for diets high in sugar and fat, the example given was that of "diets that adopt a Western lifestyle," with the background that people with these lifestyles suffer from inflammatory bowel disease.Dysfunction of the gut's immune system's pancreas cells is an important feature of inflammatory bowel disease, and people with Crohn's disease often have dysfunctional pancreas cells, according to the study.
Liu and senior author Thaddeus Stappenbeck, MD, PhD - chair of the Department of Inflammation and Immunology at the Cleveland Clinic and former co-director of the Division of Laboratory and Genomic Medicine at the University of Washington - sought to determine the cause of pancreas cell dysfunction. It seems that they have tried to find the cause of pannate cell dysfunction. The study was human subjects, analyzing a database containing demographic and clinical data on 400 people to determine the status of their pancreas cells. The researchers found that a high body mass index (BMI) was associated with pannate cells that looked abnormal and unhealthy under the microscope. The higher a person's BMI, the worse the pancreas cells look.
The study, which pursued these relationships through animal experiments, involved two strains of mice that were genetically predisposed to obesity, and the researchers were surprised to find that the obese mice had normal-looking pancreas cells.
Conclusion
This study suggests that genetic factors and the alteration of pancreas cells may have an effect on obesity. The researchers commented that it was the high-sugar and high-fat diet that should be considered as the problem, since eating too much of a healthy diet did not affect the pancreas cells.
As a postscript, the researchers confirmed that the pancreas cells returned to normal after four weeks of observation after the mice's diet was changed back to a healthy one, but it is not clear whether the pancreas cells return to normal in a short period of time in humans, so further investigation is needed.
