Why you should NOT feed a cold and starve a fever: Experts warn old-age tactic could make everything WORSE
- Old age wisdom claims that you should not eat when you have a fever
- But eating fewer calories can actually make fighting off infection much harder
- Eating to fight off sickness will prevent bacteria from spreading to other organs
- Bacteria needs to spread to thrive, so getting you healthier quicker can make it transmit to another host faster
It's a familiar feeling - you come down with a stomach bug and don't feel much like eating.
But 'starving a fever' by eating fewer calories may actually make it more difficult for your body to fight off sickness.
Eating to fight an infection could actually prevent bacteria from spreading through the intestines and to different organs, a new study claims.
Because the bacteria needs to spread to other hosts to survive, they will actually block the appetite loss response in your body to both make you healthier and also promote their transmission to others.
Not eating when you're sick could actually make an infection last longer, a new study claims. The bacteria in your body can actually help you get better faster so it can move on to other hosts and thrive
The study, conducted at the Salk Institute in California, had mice infected with the bacteria Salmonella Typhimurium.
The team tested different conditions in the infected mice and found that sick mice that consumed extra calories despite their appetite loss actually survived longer.
Researchers were surprised because along with appetite loss, mice typically become much sicker as the bacteria become more virulent, spreading from the intestines to other tissues in the body.
When the mice ate more, though, the Salmonella weren't spreading outside of the intestines and throughout the body, which enabled the animals to stay healthy despite infection.
Even more surprising, the Salmonella were acting on the intestine to try to suppress the appetite loss in the host.
The researchers initially assumed that the bacteria would spread to other areas in the body where nutrients were more plentiful.
What they found was the bacteria were making a trade-off between virulence, the ability of a microbe to cause disease within one host, and transmission, its ability to spread and establish infections between multiple hosts.
Lead author Sheila Rao, a Salk research associate, said: 'What we found was that appetite loss makes the Salmonella more virulent, perhaps because it needs to go beyond the intestines to find nutrients for itself. This increased virulence kills its host too fast, which compromises the bacteria's ability to spread to new hosts.
'The trade-off between transmission and virulence has not been appreciated before. It was previously thought that virulence and transmission were coupled.'
When the host ate more and survived longer during infection, the Salmonella benefited. Bacteria in those mice were able to spread via feces to other animals and increase their transmission between hosts.
The mice who didn't eat died sooner due to heightened bacterial virulence.
The actual mechanism for this process was a molecule produced by the Salmonella called SIrP.
The molecule blocks activation of an immune protein in the intestines that tells the brain to lose its appetite.
Researchers found that mice infected with Salmonella that couldn't make SlrP ate less food while infected, lost more weight, and died faster than control mice.
The team next wants to look at the human microbiome (the collection of bacteria that live in people's bodies) to find other bacteria that has a similar effect and explore those for new therapies tied to appetite loss and treating disease.
Dr Janelle Ayres, assistant professor at Salk Institute's Nomis Foundation Laboratories for Immunobiology and Microbial Pathogenesis, said they'd also like to investigate whether drugs could be used to turn up or down the sickness-induced appetite-loss pathway that SlrP targets.
'Now that we've identified this mechanism that regulates appetite, we want to turn it on the flip side and see if we can decrease appetite via this mechanism to help in cases of metabolic disease,' she added.
The discovery could also to the possibility of treating infectious diseases with approaches other than antibiotics, such as nutritional intervention.
Dr Ayres said: 'Finding alternatives to antibiotics is incredibly important as these drugs have already encouraged the evolution of deadly antibiotic-resistant strains.'
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