Associate editor: Paul FosterDiet and asthma — Can you change what you or your children are by changing what you eat?
Section snippets
Introduction on diet and asthma
At some level we all accept that ‘we are what we eat’. Parents are encouraged to feed their children a ‘good balanced diet’ and pregnant women are encouraged to ‘eat healthily’. However, formulating these concepts into scientifically testable hypotheses and proving that individual constituents of diet can have profound long-term effects on health outcomes is far from trivial. There is little argument that diet affects health but there is controversy over what constitutes a healthy diet. Dietary
Obesity and asthma
Obesity has also increased dramatically in many societies in the last few decades. There have been a variety of studies linking obesity and asthma but the data is inconsistent and it remains unclear whether any association is causal (Sin and Sutherland, 2008, Sutherland, 2008, Berntsen et al., 2009). Obesity has been linked to decreased lung function (Li et al., 2003, Wannamethee et al., 2005, Lin et al., 2006, Boran et al., 2007, Koziel et al., 2007) and asthma in human (Thomsen et al., 2005,
Obesity and immunological health
Obesity has been well studied in rodents (Tschop & Heiman, 2001) and high fat diet-induced obesity has been linked to pathological metabolic changes particularly metabolic syndrome (Langley-Evans et al., 2005, Shankar et al., 2008). It is now well established that obesity also changes immune function. Diet-induced obesity has been linked with increased Th1 activity in mice (Rocha et al., 2008, Johnston et al., 2008) and obesity is reported to induce a low grade pro-inflammatory state within
High-fat diet and immunological health
Despite all the work on obesity and inflammation, there are only a few studies on effects of high-fat diet on immune responses and inflammation in the absence of obesity. Puertollano et al. (Puertollano et al., 2005) showed increased serum TNF- in L. monocytogenes infected mice fed high-fat diet for 4 weeks, although no data regarding weight change is given.
Dietary fat content and fatty acid constituents have been directly linked to allergy in some but not all published studies and links to
Maternal diet can ‘programme’ offspring health
Environmental signals during prenatal development often produce structural and functional effects that persist for the lifespan. Such effects are commonly dubbed fetal ‘programming’. Studies of fetal programming could potentially explain human epidemiological findings indicating that low birth weight and other markers of an adverse intrauterine environment associate with a substantially greater incidence of cardiovascular, metabolic and neuroendocrine disorders in later life (Hales and Barker,
Programming of immune responses
Evidence is also accumulating for a role of the in utero environment in development and programming of the immune system (e.g. (Brooks et al., 2001, Kiechl-Kohlendorfer et al., 2007). Cord blood cytokines, number of IL-13 positive T cells and IgE levels (which are indicative of an allergic response) are shown to be predictors of acute lower respiratory illnesses and of risk for atopic disorders in infants (Spinozzi et al., 2001, Ly et al., 2007, Scirica et al., 2007). Low parity, febrile
Obese pregnancies and offspring immunological health
If a woman is obese during pregnancy then her child has an increased risk of becoming obese (Epstein et al., 2000, Caluwaerts et al., 2007) as well as of developing childhood asthma (Epstein et al., 2000) and eczema (Kusunoki et al., 2008). A recent study showed that not only cord blood cytokines but also adipokines, cytokines known to be produced by adipose tissue, and which are increased in obesity, were correlated with risk of early life wheezing (Rothenbacher et al., 2007). Together, these
Fatty acids during pregnancy
Various publications show no effects of n-3 LCPUFAs early in life in reducing allergies (Prescott et al., 2007, Prescott and Dunstan, 2007). There is some preliminary evidence to suggest fish oil supplementation of maternal diet may reduce allergies in the offspring (Prescott et al., 2007, Prescott and Dunstan, 2007). One study reported that eating fish (which contain high levels of omega 3 fatty acids) and apples during pregnancy was associated with less allergy and asthma in children at
TLR-4 signalling—a potential mechanism for fat induced changes in immunity?
Why obesity should induce a pro-inflammatory state is not clear. Neither dietary fat nor adipose tissue contain any obvious ‘danger’ signals. However, it has been reported that long-chain saturated fatty acids can activate TLR-4 signalling leading to local cytokine release (Weatherill et al., 2005, Nguyen et al., 2007, Milanski et al., 2009). In contrast 'omega 3' fatty acid (the n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid docosahexaenoic acid) inhibited TLR-4 mediated innate immune responses. It has been
Future perspectives
To improve child health and reduce future health care costs it would be beneficial to undertake longitudinal, epidemiological studies in human populations to investigate effects of dietary fat on the risk of developing asthma. It is equally important to establish whether or not programming of the fetal immune system in obese pregnancies affects the risk of developing allergies/wheezing in early and/or adult life. Delineation of relevant immune changes in human lean and obese pregnancies may
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Fatty acids, inflammation, and asthma
2014, Journal of Allergy and Clinical ImmunologyCitation Excerpt :This proinflammatory state found in obesity might be a critical player in the role of lipid mediators in asthmatic patients. A very telling study conducted by de Vries and Howie57 showed that mice fed a diet high in saturated fat and allergen challenged before having an obese phenotype (between 6-8 weeks) displayed decreased proinflammatory cytokine production by lung draining lymph node cells and decreased eotaxin and lung eosinophilia compared with control mice on an 11% fat diet. Compared with a low-fat diet, asthmatic patients randomized to a high-fat diet showed acute increased airway neutrophilia and Toll-like receptor 4 mRNA expression and reductions in FEV1 and forced vital capacity.
The Epidemiology of Asthma
2012, Kendig and Chernick's Disorders of the Respiratory Tract in ChildrenRisk factors and prevalence of asthma and rhinitis among primary school children in Lisbon
2011, Revista Portuguesa de PneumologiaOverview of relationship of allergic asthma with diet and food intake
2015, Journal of Food Quality and Hazards ControlComparison of essential fatty acid intakes and serum levels of inflammatory factors between asthmatic and healthy adults: A case- Control study
2014, Iranian Journal of Allergy, Asthma and ImmunologyCell biology symposium: Impacts of maternal obesity on placental and gut inflammation and health
2014, Journal of Animal Science
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