Though its role in infectious disease was long overlooked by science, diet is now known to be important in the response to infections—for example, macronutrient composition and caloric density can influence the severity of disease. Now, a study published this week (November 15) in Cell Reports indicates that other properties of food can also have an effect on how the host deals with a viral infection. The authors found that mice fed a highly processed diet were more likely to die in the weeks following an influenza infection than were mice that ate grain-based food. The findings may have important, broader implications for research with laboratory animals, which are often fed highly processed or grain-based chow with the assumption that they are equivalent.
The idea to compare the two diets grew out of a collaboration between immunologist Carl Feng and nutritional biologist Stephen Simpson, both at the University of Sydney, ...
