Immunity
Volume 51, Issue 5, 19 November 2019, Pages 794-811
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Review
Western Diet and the Immune System: An Inflammatory Connection

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The consumption of Western-type calorically rich diets combined with chronic overnutrition and a sedentary lifestyle in Western societies evokes a state of chronic metabolic inflammation, termed metaflammation. Metaflammation contributes to the development of many prevalent non-communicable diseases (NCDs), and these lifestyle-associated pathologies represent a rising public health problem with global epidemic dimensions. A better understanding of how modern lifestyle and Western diet (WD) activate immune cells is essential for the development of efficient preventive and therapeutic strategies for common NCDs. Here, we review the current mechanistic understanding of how the Western lifestyle can induce metaflammation, and we discuss how this knowledge can be translated to protect the public from the health burden associated with their selected lifestyle.

Keywords

Western-type diets
Western diet
microbiome
metaflammation
non-communicable diseases
cellular crosstalk
trained immunity
innate immune memory
immunometabolism
epigenetic reprogramming
metabolic diseases

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