What you eat for lunch could influence your immune system just hours later

What you eat for lunch could influence your immune system hours later

By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron

“Starve a cold, feed a fever” is a myth, but according to new research, when we eat in the short term may play a role in how our bodies fight infections.

Researchers analyzed blood samples taken before breakfast from 31 study participants and then taken again six hours later, after the participants had eaten breakfast and lunch. The researchers found that their T cells – a type of immune cell – present in blood samples after lunch seemed better prepared to fight infection than their T cells when they woke up, in other words, after not eating anything for hours.

The results were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

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The “fed” T cells were “functionally better,” says Greg Delgoffe, lead author of the study and an immunologist at the University of Pittsburgh. “They were better at doing the things that T cells do.”

In further experiments with mice, the researchers found that the type of food also seemed to matter: a high-fat diet (in this case, corn oil) emerged as the key to boosting T cell capabilities compared to diets high in carbohydrates or protein.

T cells, or T lymphocytes, explains Delgoffe, are like the “soldiers” of the immune system. They remain in the body’s tissues, ready to spring into action to fend off viruses, bacteria, cancer cells and more. When T cells detect a pathogen, they activate and proliferate to form an army of fighters, he explains. And in T cells collected after a meal, these abilities were enhanced, he says.

Interestingly, T cells seem to retain the advantage provided by a good meal, Delgoffe says. When he and his colleagues looked at the same cells a week later, after they had divided, T cells from the postprandial state still retained their advantage. This finding was similar in mice.

The study doesn’t say, however, whether humans should eat a fatty meal if they’re worried about getting sick. Rather, the findings support the idea that a well-balanced diet, including healthy fats, can help strengthen our immune response to pathogens, Delgoffe says. “We don’t want anyone to just drink a gallon of corn oil.”

Ultimately, he hopes these findings could help scientists better design T-cell therapies that target cancer cells, or diets that boost our bodies’ response to treatments such as vaccines.

“We are very, very excited about what happens next,” Delgoffe says.

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