Whipworms no match for a fatty feast

A high-fat diet may be the key to purging certain gut parasites.

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The complex and fraught battlefield where science and opinion wage wars over diet and nutrition is a place where your Back Page scribbler fears to tread.

To do so is to risk opening a can of worms, but when duty calls one must gird the loins and enter the fray.

Today’s sortie involves an intriguing combination of high-fat diets and parasitic whipworms in developing countries.

Whipworms are fairly nasty critters (google pictures at your peril) which can cause long-lasting and deadly infections in the large intestine and are very common in poorer communities with shitty sanitation.

But surprisingly, there may be a simple, if controversial, way to combat the parasites: junk food.

Scientists from Lancaster University and the University of Manchester in the UK have this week released research showing that a high-fat diet allows the immune system to eliminate the parasite. 

The findings, published in the journal Mucosal Immunology, show how a high-fat diet increases a molecule on T-helper cells, called ST2, and this allows an increased T-helper 2 response which expels the parasite from the large intestinal lining.  

Admittedly, it’s only a mouse study, but the researchers say their work contains key insights into how worm infections and Western diets interact in developing nations.

“We were quite surprised by what we found during this study. High-fat diets are mostly associated with increased pathology during disease. However, in the case of whipworm infection this high-fat diet licenses the T-helper cells to make the correct immune response to expel the worm,” co-lead Dr John Worthington from Lancaster University, told media.

However, underlining the complex interaction of diet and disease, he also warned that previous studies showed that weight loss could help with the expulsion of a different gut parasite worm, so these results might well be “context specific”.

“But what is really exciting is the demonstration of how diet can profoundly alter the capacity to generate protective immunity and this may give us new clues for treatments for the millions who suffer from intestinal parasitic infections worldwide,” he said.

Certainly from this correspondent’s perspective, if the choice is between having whipworms in the gut and chowing down on a global brand’s burger offering, all we can say is: “Yes, we would like fries with that.”

If you see something that creates a gut reaction, flush it down the intertubes to  penny@medicalrepublic.com.au.