A healthy and balanced diet to keep healthy. In this study published in the English-language scientific journal eLife, researchers from Inserm and Institut Curie have shown that the absence in the diet of compounds, found in broccoli and cabbage, can aggravate skin allergies.
It was already known that many factors, including diet, could vary the severity of these skin allergies. But the contribution of specific nutrients was not known.
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In their work, the scientists were interested in food compounds that act on a molecule present in the body, called "aromatic hydrocarbon receptor" (AhR). These nutrients are naturally present in cruciferous vegetables, such as broccoli.
They showed that the absence of these nutrients in mice was associated with an increase in the state of inflammation in the skin and a worsening of skin allergy, which was not the case for mice fed a diet containing these compounds.
Biological mechanisms
When the latter are absent, the researchers found an overproduction of a molecule, called TGF-beta, in the epidermis of mice. And this overproduction disrupts the normal functioning of a class of immune cells, Langerhans cells, exclusively present in the skin and functioning as a "modulator of skin immune responses".
The scientists then showed that the compounds activating the AhR receptor also controlled the production of TGF-beta in human skin cells.
"Our results suggest that an unbalanced diet could increase allergic skin reactions in humans," said Elodie Segura, an Inserm researcher who led this study at Institut Curie.