Obesity, diabetes, and the overall health of the immune system are all current issues, especially during the pandemic. To explore how diet can help prevent issues with these ailments, the University of Maryland (UMD) recently received a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Food and Agriculture Institute (USDA-NIFA) to study to make nettle as a food act. Incorporating this plant in your diet may provide protection from overweight, fight insulin resistance, and even stimulate positive changes in your gut bacteria that will to your immune system.
Although nettle extract has previously been studied as a benefit and is readily available on the market, nettle has hardly been studied as an active food that provides protective benefits in the diet. Its effect on the gut midge, the growing balance of bacteria in your gut that affects the health of your immune system, is also largely unexplored. With this work, researchers hope to find out how nettle could help improve public health.
We need food for energy and nutrition for daily functioning, but action food is a step beyond just food. It has special health effects that it gives to your body as well as just energy and nutrition. It is not a drug or a medicine, but it can prevent certain diseases. In my lab, I focus on functional foods that are important for protecting metabolic health. They are not a place to exercise and live a healthy lifestyle, but they do provide additional health benefits to provide an overall protective effect for better health. “
Diana Obanda, Associate Professor, Nutrition & Food Science at UMD and Principal Investigator
As Obanda describes, metabolic health or heart health is closely linked to the health of your gut microbiome. “In this donation, we plan to find out how the changes in gut microbiota affect obesity mechanisms,” Obanda said. “The species of bacteria that increase or decrease due to nettles in the nettle, what do they do to affect the immune system and obesity? How are the phytochemicals in the nettle? altering or affecting these species of bacteria, and how do these mechanisms work to affect symptoms for obesity and diabetes? “
But the gut microbiome can do more than affect metabolic health. Most think of the gut as the main center of your immune system, meaning that changes in the microbiota of the gut lead to changes in the strength of the immune system. agad.
“A very large portion of the immune system is in the gut,” Obanda said. “And the bacteria in the gut affect the immune system. And from previous work, the immune system is involved in obesity mechanisms. The gut bacteria shape the immune system. defense, and the immune system also shapes the bacteria of the gut, so it is a circle of which little is known.The innovation of this work seeks to explain how This particular food affects our health through the microbiota, and then goes on to find out exactly what happens to turn that into beneficial effects. “
Obanda has a particular interest in plants such as nettles and other active foods such as cabbage which are becoming popular in the US, but which have always been a regular part of the diet in countries such as her home country of Kenya. . “Nests have been studied for a very long time in different cultures, and they really grow all over the world,” Obanda says. “You’ll find a lot in previous work on nettles as a food in some cultures, and the section is marketed and widely available as a supplement. But no one had studied nettles as a food for benefits health, so I wanted to study it as an active food in the diet. Does it have the same effect? ”
To investigate this issue, Obanda worked with the Green Farming Garden in Fulton, Md. This extensive garden was started and maintained by the late researcher James (Jim), a renowned scientist at the USDA and a strong believer in medicine. dietary benefits. Here, Obanda was able to gather a proven track record for its start-up work and the studies it will conduct as part of this new USDA grant. She has also collected seeds and planted nettles at the UMD Research Greenhouse Center to continue her work. Obanda has been studying nettles for five years now, and looks forward to taking this work forward, from basic science to applied and public health practice.
“My goal as a basic scientist is to understand the ways in which things work, but ultimately to find colleagues who do clinical studies,” says Obanda. “We do our basic studies in animal cells and models, but then to achieve a wider impact, the work needs to go further to apply what we learn. I’m looking at it. continue to create collaborations with scientists across clinical science and public health, to help translate this work into data that can be used for general public health. “