Switching to Keto or Vegan Diets Can Quickly Impact the Immune System
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People who aren’t sure if they’re ready to make radical changes to their eating habits to adopt vegan or keto diet now have one more reason to consider giving it a shot: A new study suggests that switching to one of these diets may cause rapid changes in the immune system.
Vegan diets exclude all animal products and are typically low in fat, while keto diets feature high-fat animal proteins and limit carbs. For the study, scientists examined lab tests on blood, urine, and stool samples to see how a vegan diet or a keto diet might impact the immune system.
“It was quite remarkable that such a short dietary intervention, only two weeks, could remodel the immune system of all participants independently of their age, gender, body mass index, ethnicity, or race,” says lead study author Verena Link, PhD, a bioinformatics specialist at the National Institutes of Health.
Dietary Changes Led to ‘Rapid Impact’ on Immunity
“The fact that nutrition could have such a dominant and rapid impact on immunity was a real surprise to us,” Dr. Link adds.
The study didn’t look at what people ate prior to joining the experiment, and it also wasn’t designed to test whether or how switching to a vegan or keto diet might directly improve people’s ability to fight infections or avoid illness. Researchers also didn’t report whether lab results suggesting shifts in immune function might be positive or negative changes.
While it’s possible people experienced some beneficial shifts, the opposite might also be happening, says Samantha Heller, RD, a registered dietitian and exercise physiologist in New York City, who wasn’t involved in the new study.
“A boosted immune system may not be a positive effect, because for example, autoimmune diseases appear to be the result of an immune system in overdrive, a malfunction,” Heller says, adding that the keto diet in particular may leave people deficient in certain nutrients. “A balanced body, dietary pattern, lifestyle, and immune system is what we should strive for.”
Too Soon to Recommend a Diet for Immune Health
Without knowing more about the long-term effects of either diet on immune health in larger populations of people, it’s too soon to recommend that people choose one of these diets for this specific reason, says Michal Melamed, MD, a professor of medicine at New York University, who wasn’t involved in the new study.
“It may be a little early to give recommendations about diet as related to immune function based on this analysis,” Dr. Melamed says.
These diets may also be hard for people to stick with over the long haul, and following a vegan or keto diet just some of the time might not produce the effects seen in the study, says Matthew Carter, a microbiology and immunology PhD candidate at Stanford University in California, who wasn’t involved in the new study.
“I think sustainability of dietary changes also matters a great deal,” Carter says. “If a diet is so restrictive that you can’t stick with it for a period of time, then it’s probably not a good fit for you.”
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