Intermittent fasting can reboot your immune system. A plant-based diet promotes the growth of “good” bacteria. Skip the morning coffee: Mushroom tea has anti-cancer properties. In all this, theories linking health, diet and immunity are filled with articles and bombarded consumers.
Behind the headlines and labels, many of these theories often lack sufficient scientific evidence. That’s partly because it’s a challenge to document what people eat and how it affects them in rigorous studies. In addition, the relevance of animal and cellular findings to human health is unclear and sometimes exaggerated in the interest of commercial interests, leading to a distrust of nutrition science.
Over the past five years, researchers have used innovative approaches to nutritional immunology to gradually remedy this lack of trust. While nutrition experts have always studied the Mediterranean diet in general or the Western diet in general, they now have the tools to understand the short-term effects – both good and bad – of specific dietary types and components, as well as the underlying molecular mechanisms by which foods act on the immune system.
The field is attracting a lot of attention and funding. In April, the New England Journal of Medicine published a series of review articles on nutrition, immunity, and disease, and in January the United States hosted its first Food is Medicine Summit in Washington, D.C. The summit explored the links between food security, diet and chronic diseases.
Some people believe that the modern diet, especially in the Western world, alters our immune response and undermines our immune resilience. Other optimists believe that diet can help treat a range of health problems, such as cancer and chronic immune diseases like lupus.
It’s still early days, but many scientists in the field are confident. “We are learning more and more about how to regulate your immune system through a single ingredient or a combination of food ingredients,” says Francesco Siracusa, an immunologist at the University of Hamburg’s Eppendorf Hospital in Germany. As a potential therapy, “the rise of personalized nutrition in the last five or six years has been exciting.”
Fiber and fat
Physicians since the time of Hippocrates have been looking for a link between diet and health. In 1912, Polish biochemist Casimir Funk proposed that a lack of essential nutrients, which he called “vitamins,” could lead to diseases such as scurvy and rickets, and further research on vitamins later confirmed the importance of these essential nutrients for immunity.
Over the past decade, “omics” techniques have become increasingly popular to classify and analyze biomolecules, such as genes and proteins, within cells or tissues, helping to reveal how different diets and dietary components affect the immune system and health.
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