Western diet, BMI is not high, can trigger easily published intestinal disease

Eating a typical Western diet, the high sugar and fat, can cause major changes in intestinal immune cells that pave the way for irritation intestine (IBD), chronic conditions that can be painful and have a negative effect on one’s life. This study involves mice, including some with genetic mutations that cause them to overeat.

The Western diet is generally high salt, sugar, and fat, with excessive meat consumption and too much processed food. The potential for the impact of this diet to health has been widely studied and related to things such as an increased risk of cancer and heart disease. The same diet can also put someone at risk of IBD.

This new study came from the Washington University School of Medicine, where the researchers found that both humans and mice fed to eat a high-fat and sugar diet had abnormal intestinal immune cells called paneth cells. Abnormality places the digestive tract on an increased risk of inflammation, key elements of inflammatory bowel disease.

This study found that someone’s BMI was higher, the more damaged their paneth cells. However, further exploration of this using mice found that BMI was not a driving factor behind this dysfunction, but a high-fat and sugar diet, overconsume among the main causes of obesity in humans.

Excessive eating healthy diets did not produce abnormal paneth cells in high BMI rats, but indeed it led to damaged cells in mice overfed diets where 40 percent of calories came from sugar and fat. The good news is that Paneth cells return to normal in mice returned on their healthy diet after only four weeks.