By Sarah Sloat
Filed Under Biology, Health & Public Health
The gut is in a complicated relationship with the brain. The dynamic goes both ways: A troubled gastrointestinal system sends distress signals to the brain, and a bothered brain sends similar signals to the gut. On Monday, at the 2019 Experimental Biology meeting in Orlando, scientists gave a glimpse of what happens to the brain when gut health declines — and presented a delicious intervention that may help prevent that decline from happening.
With the results of a mouse study, scientists from the University of Louisville make a compelling case for the consumption of garlic. This pungent member of the onion genus Allium contains a compound called allyl sulfide, which, as these scientists discovered, helps keep gut microorganisms healthy — which in turn keeps cognitive health robust.
Garlic, they find, may be especially important for the elderly. In older people, the diversity of gut microbiota — the trillions of microorganisms that colonize the gut — is diminished, and this may underlie many ailments of the elderly. As people get older, neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s develop, and in turn memory and cognitive abilities decline. The scientists suspected that changes in the diversity of the gut microbiota could be linked to these deteriorations, and that garlic may help prevent them from happening in the first place.
Lead author Jyotirmaya Behera, Ph.D., said that “dietary administration of garlic containing allyl sulfide” could keep these declines at bay.
Old mice given the garlic compound had improved memories.
The Power of Garlic
The power of garlic was revealed by groups of mice that received an oral supplement of allyl sulfide. The mice that took the supplement were 24 months old (equivalent to 56 to 69 human years); the other groups were made up of mice that were either 24 months old or four months old, neither of which received the supplement.
The older mice who received the garlic compound demonstrated better long- and short-term memory than the other 24-month-old mice who did not receive it, the team reports. Notably, they also had healthier gut microbiota: the allyl sulfide supplements appeared to prevent intestinal inflammation.
Furthermore, those mice had higher levels of a protein-coding gene called NDNF. Previously, University of Louisville researchers discovered that this protein is required for long-term and short-term memory consolidation. Now, the scientists suspect that oral allyl sulfide benefits NDNF, in turn stalling cognitive decline.
At least in mice, allyl sulfide appears to pack a one-two punch that keeps down gastrointestinal inflammation while improving the diversity and maintaining the homeostasis of gut microbiota. And a happy gut means a happy human: The microbial communities that live in us play a fundamental role in our health, the extent of which we’re still discovering.
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