What You Eat Affects Your Immune System: Keto vs Vegan Diet

Eating different foods can change how our body fights illness. To understand this better, researchers had 20 people eat only vegan food or high-fat, low-carbohydrate food which is a ketogenic diet for 2 weeks (Link VM, et.al., 2024).

They used advanced tests to see how these diets affected the body's defense system and gut bacteria.

They found that the ketogenic diet was associated with a significant upregulation of pathways associated with the adaptive immune system, while the vegan diet had a significant impact on the innate immune system including upregulation of pathways associated with antiviral immunity.

The ketogenic diet caused a strong downregulation of most microbial pathways compared to the base line and the vegan diet. This showed that the ketogenic diet did not have a beneficial effect on the bacterial flora.

This study shows that even a short period of eating a specific diet can have a big effect on our health.

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Reference: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38291301/

Link VM, Subramanian P, Cheung F, Han KL, Stacy A, Chi L, Sellers BA, Koroleva G, Courville AB, Mistry S, Burns A, Apps R, Hall KD, Belkaid Y. Differential peripheral immune signatures elicited by vegan versus ketogenic diets in humans. Nat Med. 2024 Jan 30. doi: 10.1038/s41591-023-02761-2.