Links between diet and lung inflammation

In recent decades, there has been a well-documented increase in the incidence of allergic asthma in developed countries, and coincident with this increase have been changes in diet, including reduced consumption of fiber and increased consumption of sugar and fat. Dietary fibers have been linked with beneficial effects in gastrointestinal inflammatory disorders and protection from colon cancer; however, little is known about the consequences of dietary fiber intake on inflammation outside of the intestine. We recently showed that the amount of dietary fermentable fiber could influence the development of allergic inflammation in mice (Trompette et al). This cross-talk between the gut and the lung involved the release of metabolites from the gut following bacterial fermentation of the fiber, which went into the circulation and influenced bone marrow hematopoiesis.

We now aim to understand how diet and gut metabolites can influence inflammation in the lung, with particularly interest in the gut-bone marrow-lung axis.