Andy’s Quick Hits (152): Oh dear! Meat, the microbiome, and Multiple Sclerosis

A number of pieces have come out recently on Multiple Sclerosis (MS), a common debilitating neurodegenerative disease. This recent piece from the University of Connecticut took a unique approach of analysing diet and microbiome together and how this could possibly be related to MS in 25 healthy individuals and 24 with MS.

I have reported on multiple studies over the previous year on the microbiome and how this is related to multiple health factors including brain development, loneliness, and wisdom. The researchers found a connection between meat consumption and how this seems to affect the microbiome. Namely increased meat consumption was related to a decreased population of Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron — this is associated with digesting carbohydrates from vegetables.

Moreover, there also seems to be a relationship with immune function and with higher meat consumption in MS patients also linked to an increase in T-helper 17 cells in the immune system, and an increase in S-adenosyl-L-methionine (SAM) in their blood.

The study is too small to draw definitive conclusions, and obviously the healthy controls also ate meat, but nevertheless interesting to see how diet and the microbiome can have these effects and increase risk or contribute to diseases such as MS.