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According to a new Inserm study, the nutrients naturally present in cabbage and in particular broccoli on the plate would play a role against skin allergies. Doing without it, on the other hand, would aggravate the inflammation of the skin.
This is not new: adopting a healthy and balanced diet, giving a good part to fruits and vegetables is good for your health. But Inserm and the Institut Curie have recently taken an interest in nutrients that can increase or decrease the severity of skin allergies. With an astonishing result: the absence in the diet of compounds found in certain vegetables, in particular broccolimay aggravate skin allergies in animal models.
The scientists were specifically interested in “aromatic hydrocarbon receptors” (AhR), nutrients naturally present in cabbage and particularly broccoli, and their involvement in a skin allergy model in mice.
Some animals received a diet that contained these compounds, others a diet that did not contain any compound that activates the AhR receptor, in order to assess the impact this could have on the severity of their allergy.
Scientists have thus shown that the absence of these nutrients is associated with an increase in the state of inflammation in the skin and an aggravation of skin allergy.
By what mechanism? The researchers explain that when these nutrients are absent, an overproduction of a molecule called TGF-beta in the epidermis of mice occurs. “This overproduction of TGF-beta disrupts the normal functioning of a population of immune cells, the ‘Langerhans cells’, which are exclusively present in the skin and function as a modulator of cutaneous immune responses.” explains the Inserm press release published today.
The scientists then validated these results by showing that compounds that activate the AhR receptor also control the production of TGF-beta in human skin cells.
Towards other studies on psoriasis and the tumor context
Previous studies have already shown that these food compounds are associated with aggravation of inflammatory bowel diseases and neuro-inflammation, but their effect on allergic immune reactions has so far not been documented.
“Our results suggest that an unbalanced diet may increase allergic skin reactions in humans through mechanisms that we have precisely described. Schematically, we could say that our work helps to explain why eating vegetables such as broccoli and cabbage can limit the severity of skin allergies and why it is therefore important to include them in your diet.”, emphasizes Élodie Segura, Inserm researcher, who led this study at the Institut Curie.
Based on these data, the research team now wishes to focus on the role of food compounds activating the AhR receptor in other inflammatory pathological contexts, for example in a tumor context. The results of this study could also apply to other skin diseases where inflammatory mechanisms are involved, such as psoriasis. Moreover, they also open up interesting avenues of research to better study the intestine-skin axis in the development of allergic diseases.
In the meantime, if you suffer from skin allergies, remember to add broccoli to your basket during your next purchases.