If you want to get the most out of your flu vaccine, you may want to ditch the red meat and butter, new research suggests.
A new study showed that feeding obese mice a low-fat menu before vaccinating them made them better at fighting off the flu virus.
A low-fat diet focuses on eating products of which only 30 percent consists of fat. according to the American Cancer Society. This means you should eat products like low-fat milk, lean meats like chicken, whole grains, and plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables.
Experts who conducted the study found that a low-fat diet results in significant, long-term weight loss, boosting the immune system.
Vaccinations work by training the body’s immune cells to recognize and fight viral material. Therefore, they are effective when introduced into a healthy immune system.
By switching to a low-fat diet before the flu vaccination, obese mice had a better chance of surviving the flu virus.
A low-fat diet contrasts with the Western diet, which is traditionally high in fat and processed foods, said Dr. Stacey Schultz-Cherry, deputy director of the WHO’s Collaborating Center for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals and Birds. who co-authored the new study.
Overweight people are twice as likely to get the flu than people of average weight, even if both groups have been vaccinated, according to 2017 research from the Human Vaccine Institute.
In 2023, about 370,000 Americans were hospitalized by the flu, and about 24,000 died. According to the CDC.
Although the agency did not report details, it estimates that 95 percent of people hospitalized had an underlying condition that worsens the severity of the flu, such as obesity, high blood pressure or heart disease.
The study was conducted on two groups of 20 mice. The mice that lost weight before being vaccinated all survived a flu attack, but those that did not diet did not.
Dr. Shultz-Cherry’s research, which took place at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, addresses this shortage of flu vaccines for obese people.
She and her colleagues delved into the issue by giving the flu vaccine to twenty obese mice.
Half of these mice were fed a low-fat diet before vaccination. About a month later, all mice were exposed to the flu.
The ten mice on the low-fat diet survived. But all ten mice that continued to eat a high-fat diet died.
Interestingly, the results were not nearly as effective when the researchers put a different group of mice on a diet after they were vaccinated.
Only two of the mice on the diet survived, the remaining 18 mice – both those on a low-fat and high-fat diet – died.
‘Weight loss can affect the effectiveness of the vaccine, but the timing of the weight loss makes a very big difference’ Dr. Schultz Cherry told New Scientist.
However, there is still a long way to go before we can assume the same is true for humans, Dr. Schultz-Cherry said.
Mice and humans have many biological similarities, but human bodies are much more complex, says Dr Ri Scarborough, a veterinarian and cancer researcher at Monash University, wrote for the conversation.
“Because of the differences between species, something that is effective and safe in an animal may not be so in a human,” Dr Scarborough said.
Mice, for example, only live about two years. That means a month for a mouse would be years for a human, Schultz-Cherry said.
Taken together, this could be a new avenue to explore in the future to better protect people with obesity.
“We don’t know for sure, but if the outcome of using GLP-1 drugs is weight loss and improved metabolic health, we would hypothesize that this will help.”