Kevin Hall Studied Metabolism

This [paper] actually came from a really incredible opportunity. At the clinical center of the NIH, [there] was an investigator, Kevin Hall, who's a physicist by training, and he came to the NIH because he wanted to understand energy conservation in terms of human health. So, he really wanted to apply physics to biology, and he did something very interesting. He did clinical trials at the clinical center on diet and his angle was very much [on] metabolism. As you may know, people have done a lot of studies on nutrition and it's never really done in a very good way. First because people tend to actually never say the truth about what they eat and even when you actually give them a regimen they don't really follow [it], et cetera. So, it was a study where the people came to the clinical center of the NIH and stayed six weeks in the clinical center. In the clinical center, they were given either a ketogenic diet or a vegan diet and the same individuals were [then] given a different kind of diet, so you could have really the aspect of at the individual level. It was the most controlled dietary intervention that had ever been done in the world. I mean really, and it gives us a possibility. So, he [Kevin Hall] was looking at metabolism and we looked at the immune system.

Examining the Immune System

What we did was, because I was part of the Center for Human Immunology, we had actually built all the infrastructures to explore the immune system in a very multidimensional aspect using all the different kind of omics you can actually choose. Basically, we had very few individuals in the study, but we look at them in many dimensions in terms of metabolomic and transcriptomic and microbiome and so forth, and because we actually chose so much exploratory data around this thing, we were really able to see a huge amount of shift that were highly significant.

This Study Surprised Me

I have to say, I have done a lot of research, not as many in humans as in experimental animals, but I have done a few. This study is one that surprised me the most because these were individuals that were different ages, different BMI, different sex, [and] all of them responded the same way. Two weeks of one diet changed the immune system of everybody in the same direction. And I have to say, of all the things we have done, if you think about the clinical trial and the variability between human, how is it possible that diet actually superimposes genetics, age, BMI and so forth? We can actually shape the immune system in a very profound way. How this can actually translate to therapy is another question, but it's remarkable to think [that] what we actually eat every day can be so profound an agent of shaping our immune system.

Yasmine Belkaid is a renowned scientist whose research focuses on the relationship between microbes and the immune system. She is the President as well as the head of the Metaorganism laboratory at the Institut Pasteur.

Belkaid earned her Master’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Science and Technology Houari Boumediene in Algiers, and a Master of Advanced Studies (DEA) from Paris-Sud University. In 1996, she earned her PhD in immunology from the Institut Pasteur, where she studied innate immune responses to leishmania infection. Belkaid then moved to the United States for a postdoctoral fellowship in intracellular parasite biology at NIAID’s Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases (NIH).

Belkaid has received numerous awards including the Robert Koch Prize, the Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences, the Sanofi-Institut Pasteur Prize, and the AAI Excellence in Mentoring Award. She also serves on the committees of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, the Microbiome Technical Advisory Group at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the NIH Anti-Racism Steering Committee, the American Society of Microbiology, and the Genentech Scientific Resource Board.