Healthy diet can modulate intestinal bacterial composition and reduce the incidence of Alzheimer.

What is it about?

Diet has important effects on brain functions, either negatively or positively. In this work, we demonstrated that transgenic mice have more pro-inflammatory bacteria in the gut, but ingestion of bioactive food (soy, chia seed oil, dried nopal, curcuma) increased the abundance of anti-inflammatory bacteria and reduced bacterial neurotoxic products, such as lipopolysaccharides and propionate. Moreover, this food combination had a strong anti-oxidant capacity and was able to reduce brain lipid peroxidation.

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Why is it important?

Alzheimer´s disease is a multifactorial disease that has no cure or effective treatment. When transgenic mice are fed a diet rich in bioactive components, several brain alterations (synaptic and metabolic dysfunction, abeta protein aggregation, tau hyper-phosphorylation, neuroinflammation, oxidative damage) are reduced. Those changes can be correlated with restoration of the gut microbiota composition and their metabolic/released products. This opens a window of opportunity to develop dietary interventions to modulate the course of the disease, or reduce its incidence.

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