Differential peripheral immune signatures elicited by vegan versus ketogenic diets in humans 2024 Link et al

Abstract

Nutrition has broad impacts on all physiological processes. However, how nutrition affects human immunity remains largely unknown. Here we explored the impact of a dietary intervention on both immunity and the microbiota by performing a post hoc analysis of a clinical trial in which each of the 20 participants sequentially consumed vegan or ketogenic diets for 2 weeks (NCT03878108). Using a multiomics approach including multidimensional flow cytometry, transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic and metagenomic datasets, we assessed the impact of each diet, and dietary switch, on host immunity and the microbiota.

Our data revealed that overall, a ketogenic diet was associated with a significant upregulation of pathways and enrichment in cells associated with the adaptive immune system. In contrast, a vegan diet had a significant impact on the innate immune system, including upregulation of pathways associated with antiviral immunity. Both diets significantly and differentially impacted the microbiome and host-associated amino acid metabolism, with a strong downregulation of most microbial pathways following ketogenic diet compared with baseline and vegan diet. Despite the diversity of participants, we also observed a tightly connected network between datasets driven by compounds associated with amino acids, lipids and the immune system.

Collectively, this work demonstrates that in diverse participants 2 weeks of controlled dietary intervention is sufficient to significantly and divergently impact host immunity, which could have implications for precision nutritional interventions.

Open access, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02761-2

 

I’m telling you my experience with keto and how it temporarily yet dramatically improved my ME symptoms wasn’t “in my head” or a fluke. It didn’t continue to work unfortunately like many of us experience the ME adjusted somehow, but for a couple months my symptoms were much better