Just two weeks of Western diet can undermine your immunity — scientists' discovery

Just two weeks of eating with an excess of salt, sugar, fats, and refined carbohydrates can cause serious inflammation in the body and significantly weaken the immune response to various pathogens. This alarming conclusion was reached by an international group of researchers from the Radboud University Medical Center (Netherlands) in collaboration with scientists from Tanzania. The results of this important study were published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Medicine.

A large-scale experiment involved 77 healthy men from various regions of Tanzania - both urban and rural. The researchers divided the participants into four groups with different dietary regimens. The first group initially followed a traditional African diet and then switched to a typical "Western" eating model for two weeks. The second group did the reverse - abandoning the Western diet in favor of the traditional African one. The third group continued to eat as usual but supplemented their diet daily with a fermented banana drink. The fourth group served as a control and did not change their eating habits.

Scientists carefully monitored the health status of all participants at three key stages: at the beginning of the experiment, two weeks after its start, and one month after completion. The data obtained were very revealing: the transition to a Western diet led to a noticeable increase in inflammatory proteins in the subjects' bodies, significantly reduced the effectiveness of the immune response, and activated processes associated with the development of chronic diseases.

In contrast, participants who switched to a traditional African diet or regularly consumed the fermented drink demonstrated a decrease in inflammation levels. Particularly noteworthy is that some positive effects persisted even four weeks after the end of the dietary intervention, indicating the long-term impact of even short-term favorable changes in nutrition.

"Previously, scientific research mainly focused on Japanese or Mediterranean diets. However, our results show that the traditional African diet, rich in vegetables, fruits, legumes, whole grains, and fermented products, also offers valuable lessons for modern nutrition," emphasized the lead author of the study, therapist Quirijn de Mast.

De Mast also noted that the typical Western diet is characterized by a high content of high-calorie foods such as french fries and white bread, as well as an excess of salt, refined sugars, and saturated fats. It is this type of diet that provokes inflammatory processes in the body, which underlie many modern diseases.