Dietary fibre dampens asthma

摘要

A high-fibre diet curbs allergic inflammation in mouse lungs by shifting the composition of microbes in the gut. Benjamin Marsland at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and his colleagues raised mice on diets containing different levels of fibre and exposed the animals to extracts of house-dust mite, a cause of asthma. The resulting lung inflammation was less in mice consuming high levels of fermentable fibre than in those on a low-fibre diet, and the animals also harboured a community of intestinal microbes that generated higher levels of short-chain fatty acids when metabolizing fibre.