If you eat 120 – 150 g white button mushrooms each day your immune system learns to recognise pathogens faster, and this makes vaccines more effective. An animal study published by the American Camiseta PSV Eindhoven USDA in the Journal of Nutrition suggests this, but also notes that the positive effect of white button mushrooms disappears if you eat too many.
If you eat 120 – 150 g white button mushrooms each day your immune system learns to recognise pathogens faster, and this makes vaccines more effective. An animal study published by the American USDA in the Journal of Nutrition suggests this, but also notes that the positive effect of mushrooms disappears if you eat too many.
A white button mushroom-rich diet makes natural killer cells more active, USDA researchers discovered five years ago. That might mean that common white button mushrooms have a protective effect against diseases such as cancer and infectious diseases.
The researchers also discovered Camiseta Selección de fútbol de Túnez that a white button mushroom-rich diet speeds up the development of dendritic cells. [J Nutr. 2008 Mar;138(3):544-50.] These cells are like the teachers in the immune system: they help the immune system to learn how to recognise pathogens.
If you eat 120 – 150 g white button mushrooms each day your immune system learns to recognise pathogens faster, and this makes vaccines more effective. An animal study published by the American USDA in the Journal of Nutrition suggests this, but also notes that the positive effect of white button mushrooms disappears if you eat too many.
In the recent study, which was published in January 2014 in the Journal of Nutrition, the researchers wanted to find out whether supplementing mice’s diet with white button mushrooms would improve the protective effect of vaccines. The researchers used a weakened strain of the Salmonella typhimurium bacteria as the vaccine in their experiment. This is a vaccine that gives protection against stronger and more aggressive strains of Salmonella typhimurium (see photo).
Under an electron microscope they look a bit like mouldy chocolate sprinkles.
The researchers divided their mice into four groups two weeks before administering the vaccine. The first group was not vaccinated and got no mushrooms either. This was the control group [C].
A second group was vaccinated, but got no mushrooms [C+V].
A third group was vaccinated and given food containing 2 percent mushrooms [2%WBM+V]. The human equivalent of the dose would be 2.2 g fresh white button mushrooms per kg bodyweight per day. So if you weigh 85 kg you’d need to eat 130 g mushrooms daily.
A final fourth group was vaccinated and given food containing 5 percent white button mushrooms [5%WBM+V]. The human equivalent of the dose would again be 2.2 g fresh mushrooms per kg bodyweight per day. So if you weigh 85 kg you’d need to eat 325 g mushrooms daily.
Four weeks after the mice had been vaccinated the researchers infected them with the aggressive strain Salmonella typhimurium SL1344. In the three weeks that followed nearly all the mice in the control group died [C]. In the group Camiseta Real Madrid that had been vaccinated but had not been given mushrooms [C+V] thirty percent survived; in the group that had been vaccinated and had been given 2 percent white button mushrooms in their food [2%WBM+V] fifty percent survived.
The mice that had been vaccinated and had been given food containing 5 percent white button mushrooms [5%WBM+V] had only a slightly higher survival rate than the C+V group.
Just before infecting their mice the researchers extracted immune cells [T cells to be precise] from the mice and exposed them to Salmonella typhimurium in test tubes. The immune cells from the vaccinated mice that had been given mushrooms synthesised more cytokines than the immune cells from the vaccinated mice that had not been given mushrooms. This probably means that the immune cells reacted more aggressively to the virulent Salmonella typhimurium, and were more effective at destroying it.
NI = mice that had not been vaccinated; IM = mice that had been vaccinated; white bars: mice that had not been given mushrooms; black bars: mice that had been given mushrooms.
“These results suggest that white button mushrooms intake could be considered as a strategy to optimize the efficacy of some vaccines”, the researchers conclude. “Future studies are needed to determine the impact of white button mushrooms on other vaccines and to validate the clinical relevance of current findings in humans”.
The researchers’ study was partly funded by their employer the USDA. additional finance was provided by organisations in the mushroom industry.
Dietary supplementation with white button mushrooms augments the protective immune response to salmonella vaccine in mice.
Wang J, Niu X, Du X, Smith D, Meydani SN, Wu D.
Abstract
We previously showed that dietary white button mushrooms (WBMs) enhanced natural killer cell activity and that in vitro WBM supplementation promotes maturation and function of dendritic cells (DCs). The current study investigated whether WBM consumption would enhance pathogen-specific immune response using a Salmonella vaccination and infection animal model. C57BL/6 mice were fed diets containing 0%, 2%, or 5% WBM for 4 wk before oral vaccination with live attenuated Salmonella typhimurium SL1479. four weeks after immunization, mice were orally infected with virulent Salmonella typhimurium SL1344. Immunization increased animal survival and, among immunized mice, the 2% WBM group had a higher survival rate than the other groups. Next, we fed mice 2% WBMs to determine the immunological mechanism underlying the WBM-potentiated protective effect. We found that WBM supplementation increased Salmonella-specific blood immunoglobulin (Ig) G and fecal IgA concentrations. WBM-fed mice also had a higher IgG2a and unchanged IgG1 production, leading to an elevated IgG2a:IgG1 ratio and indicating an enhanced T helper 1 response. consistent with these results, WBM-fed mice had higher interferon-?, tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-?, and interleukin (IL)-17A production and unchanged IL-4 production in their splenocytes after polyclonal (anti-CD3/CD28) or antigen-specific stimulation. Furthermore, WBM-fed mice had more DCs in the spleen, and these DCs expressed higher levels of activation markers CD40 and major histocompatibility complex-II. These mice also produced more IL-12 and TNF-? postimmunization. Together, these results suggest that WBMs may improve Salmonella vaccine efficacy through an enhanced adaptive immune response.
PMID: 24259557 [PubMed – in process]
Source: