Step away from the turkey.Tryptophan, a necessary amino acid sometimes present in poultry, meat, fish, dairy merchandise, and a few nuts, is broadly recognized — and blamed — to be the reason for your post-Thanksgiving somnolence. And now, it appears prefer it may very well be doing extra injury to your physique than beforehand thought. A brand new examine out of the College of Colorado discovered that tryptophan, which performs a significant function within the manufacturing and preservation of muscle groups, protein, enzymes, and neurotransmitters, may very well be damaged down by frequent intestine micro organism right into a chemical that induces an inflammatory response — thus triggering rheumatoid arthritis or spondyloarthritis (a.okay.a. arthritis of the backbone).The aforementioned byproduct, known as indole, is a malodorous compound extra generally related to human waste. However it’s essential to notice that tryptophan doesn’t at all times flip into indole: “If tryptophan hits our physique’s cells, it tends to go get damaged down into anti-inflammatory merchandise versus when it hits the bacterial cells and goes extra inflammatory,” mentioned Dr. Kristine Kuhn, the examine’s co-author and head of Colorado College’s Division of Rheumatology. “The methods we take into consideration how this might result in therapies are: How do you retain that steadiness tipped in order that tryptophan goes in direction of that anti-inflammatory pathway? How are you going to manipulate intestinal micro organism to tip that steadiness? That is the place we’re focused on going sooner or later.”
To unravel issues, Kuhn and her colleagues made use of the collagen-induced arthritis (CIA) mannequin in mice — an oft-used autoimmune illustration of rheumatoid arthritis. And the consequence “recognized alterations in tryptophan metabolism, and particularly indole, that correlated with illness.”
“We discovered that when indole is current, the mice begin to develop autoreactive T-cells which might be extra inflammatory,” Kuhn mentioned. “They’ve much less of these regulatory T-cells that assist preserve steadiness within the immune system, and so they begin to develop antibodies which might be extra pathogenic. We discovered that the antibodies had flags for being extra inflammatory when indole was current.”
So the place does that depart us? Nicely, it’s one thing we’ve all heard earlier than. As a result of tryptophan is ever-present in protein-rich meals, the advice is to intention for “a food regimen that’s wealthy in plant-based fibers and lean meats — this entire Mediterranean food regimen — appears to push the microbiome right into a more healthy state, so that you’re getting the anti-inflammatory properties of tryptophan, whereas the standard western food regimen appears to go extra towards the inflammatory pathway.”