How unhealthy diet makes you sick |
The intestine is essential for maintaining our energy balance and is a master at reacting quickly to changes in nutrition and nutrient balance. It manages to do this with the help of intestinal cells that among other things are specialized in the absorption of food components or the secretion of hormones.
In adult humans, the intestinal cells regenerate every five to seven days. The ability to constantly renew and develop all types of intestinal cells from intestinal stem cells is crucial for the natural adaptability of the digestive system. However, a long-term diet high in sugar and fat disrupts this adaptation and can contribute to the development of obesity, type 2 diabetes and gastrointestinal cancer.
The molecular mechanisms behind this maladaptation are part of the research field of the group of Heiko Lickert, professor for diabetes research and ß-cell biology at the Technical University of Munich and head of the Institute for Diabetes and Regeneration Research at Helmholtz Munich.
The scientists assume that intestinal stem cells play a special role in the maladaptation. Using a mouse model, the researchers investigated the effects of a high-sugar and high-fat diet and compared it with a control group.
“The first thing we noticed was that the small intestine increases greatly in size on the high-calorie diet,” says study leader Anika Böttcher. “Together with Fabian Theis’ team of computational biologists, we then profiled 27,000 intestinal cells from control diet and high fat/high sugar diet fed mice. Using new machine learning techniques, we thus found that intestinal stem cells divide and differentiate significantly faster in the mice on an unhealthy diet.”