Study links meat eating to inflammation, worse gut health

The strongest systemic linkage was found with eating meat

Eating more meat, having less of a carbohydrate-digesting bacteria in the gut, and more pro-inflammatory immune cells in the blood all link with multiple sclerosis (MS), an international team has found.

Increasingly, evidence suggests that bacteria living in our gut can affect our immune system; and what we eat can affect the bacteria in our guts. MS is particularly prevalent in the mid-latitudes including the United States and Australia, suggesting that geography and potentially local diet has some effect.

The complex study of 49 people aimed to tease out the exact relationships between diet, immune response and MS by using advanced multi-OMICS, a biological analysis approach combining multiple datasets.

A direct relationship between meat eating, the gut microbiome, peripheral immune profile and the other factors was not shown. However, the pattern of all the factors was suggestive that, in MS, something goes wrong with people’s gut bacteria that dissociates them from the immune system – leading to heightened T-helper 17 cells and autoimmune attacks on the nervous system – and it tends to be associated with meat eating.