CELL IS a wonderful medical journal which over the years has given me pleasure with absolutely new knowledge. Researchers around the world are working on so many miracles, so when someone asks me a question: the websites promoting health by charlatan chiropractors or self-proclaimed nutrition gurus are not the source to give . In fact, there are so much false or fake or incomplete information being passed on as expert opinion. It is better to type in : immune response to American diet, scientific articles and then google scholar would give you scientific articles.
One of the common questions I get asked by patients and acquaintances these days is: How can we boost our immunity?
What SARS-CoV-2 infections have brought into social discourse is : what is our immunity like ? how to boost it ?
Many years ago, when I went to a poor indigenous community in the USA, I was surprised by the fact that majority of the adults had High levels Total Cholesterol and High levels of LDL (the “bad” cholesterol). It occurred to me at that time that higher levels of cholesterol are an expression of inflammation in the body. I had participated in the testing of an isolated tribe of Indians, and found that their cholesterol levels were “low” by the accepted standards.
Since then I have firmly believed that many of our chronic disorders, Diabetes and Hypertension and Cardiovascular Diseases and rheumatological disease, were an expression of exuberant inflammation by our bodies. In my travels I would find that Chinese among the population had a lower CRP (a marker of Inflammation) than the Indians among the population than the Malays who had the highest rate of CRP and correspondingly the Malays had the highest rate of Obesity as well as Hypertension in that country.
In the past month there has been a scientific information explosion after the onslaught of SARS-CoV-2 Virus from Israel, Germany and the USA among others. The mechanisms of infection by this virus, ACE2 receptors and also the genetic coding for androgen regulated TMPRSS2.
Initially the health care team concentrated on direct damage of the virus to lung tissues and within the last week or so (research was there after MERS and SARS), more attention has been paid to Exuberant Immunological response or called “Cytokine Storm”, that in people with lower expression of immunity, when confronted with an insult from outside there is an exuberant response and that attacks the heart, the lung, oxygen carrying capacity ( much like the High Altitude Sickness described by Dr Carlos Monge of Peru (acute as well as Chronic)..with laboratory tests to back them up and even prognostic of the eventual outcome.
The underlying inflammation which may trigger? this exuberant response may tell us why certain groups are susceptible. Obese, and Black people are disproportionately obese in the population, Gay men ( I am not sure why? If they are not HIV positive or on anti-retroviral), Hypertension, Diabetes. I am sure there are more than one explanation.
So, it is interesting when this article is published in CELL magazine.
That Western Diet can suppress your immunity and that even when you start to correct it , the memory immunologically persists.. This may explain why some people do not benefit when they change from an American diet to a vegetarian diet, as they are not able to ablate the immunological memory?
85 % of the persons tested are asymptomatic or treated at home. Of the 15%, it looks like 5% die, 10 per cent recuperate. One in six people needing medical attention seems to be a large proportion, all of these are approximate but shows us the magnitude of the problem. USA has become an immune deficient nation ? with its social and scientific explanations of such low immunity and exuberant response ? Nice to think about these things.
Summary of the CELL article:
Highlights
- •Western diet triggers innate immunity, NOD-like, and IFN signaling pathways
- •Western diet alters in vivo LPS responses of GMPs
- •Western diet induces long-lasting trained immunity in myeloid cells
- •NLRP3 recognizes Western diet and mediates trained immunity
Summary
Long-term epigenetic reprogramming of innate immune cells in response to microbes, also termed “trained immunity,” causes prolonged altered cellular functionality to protect from secondary infections. Here, we investigated whether sterile triggers of inflammation induce trained immunity and thereby influence innate immune responses. Western diet (WD) feeding of Ldlr−/− mice induced systemic inflammation, which was undetectable in serum soon after mice were shifted back to a chow diet (CD). In contrast, myeloid cell responses toward innate stimuli remained broadly augmented. WD-induced transcriptomic and epigenomic reprogramming of myeloid progenitor cells led to increased proliferation and enhanced innate immune responses. Quantitative trait locus (QTL) analysis in human monocytes trained with oxidized low-density lipoprotein (oxLDL) and stimulated with lipopolysaccharide (LPS) suggested inflammasome-mediated trained immunity. Consistently, Nlrp3−/−/Ldlr−/− mice lacked WD-induced systemic inflammation, myeloid progenitor proliferation, and reprogramming. Hence, NLRP3 mediates trained immunity following WD and could thereby mediate the potentially deleterious effects of trained immunity in inflammatory diseases.
