Cutting out animal protein in favor of a plant-based diet appears to change the makeup of bacteria in the gut and helps protect against salt-related heart disease, new research at Augusta University found. It also protected against a serious complication in pregnancy and the effect seems to be passed down to offspring, the researchers found.

The discovery in rats was actually unintended and came about because the researchers years ago were trying to find a more affordable feed for them, said Dr. David Mattson, chair of the Department of Physiology at Medical College of Georgia at AU. He and his colleagues were working with a rat specially bred to be sensitive to salt and to develop heart disease when fed a high-salt diet.

"They will start to develop cardiovascular disease," Mattson said. "They will start having heart failure, they will start having strokes. If we dont do something for them quite quickly, they will start to die, which completely parallels what is observed in salt-sensitive humans."

But when they switched the rats from a diet whose protein contained casein, a protein found in milk, to one with a wheat gluten protein, the animals didn't respond as they normally would. The researchers confirmed this by comparing the same type of rat fed the animal-protein diet to the grain-fed diet, said Dr. Justine Abais-Battad, an instructor in Physiology and lead author on the study in the journal Acta Physiologica.

The grain-fed rats "still are ingesting the same amount of salt but werent salt-sensitive any more," she said, while those on the animal protein diet developed heart disease and kidney damage, as expected.

The animals appear to have different bacteria in their guts as a results of the switch, a change in what is called the microbiome,Abais-Battad said.

"What Justine has shown here is this big switch in the microbiome," Mattson said, which are millions of different bacteria that help humans break down and digest food and perform other basic functions related to health. Unhealthy colonies of bacteria can lead to disorders such as irritable bowel syndrome, constipation and other problems, said Dr. Satish Rao, chief of gastroenterology and director of the Digestive Health Center at AU Health System.

But the diet switch also appears to have an effect in preeclampsia, Mattson said, a serious and potentially deadly complication in pregnancy where women develop high blood pressure and can have damage to the kidneys and liver. Post-doctoral fellow John Henry Dasinger's work showed that those fed the grain-based diet were protected while death "in these pregnant female rats was tremendous when fed the disease-promoting diet," Mattson said. That study was published in the journal Pregnancy Hypertension.

The takeaway from this is what people have been hearing all along, Abais-Battad said.

"People already know that these types of habits, these healthier choices would be protective" against heart disease, she said.

Interestingly, offspring from parents fed the grain-based diet also appear to have the protective effect even when fed the animal protein diet, Abais-Battad said.

"Even though all of the offspring were fed the same disease-promoting diet,those who came from the grain-fed parents, we actually saw a reduction in their disease over time," she said. The theory is they have inherited the bacterial makeup, the microbiome, from the parents, most likely Mom, Abais-Battad said.

"Theres a lot of literature demonstrating the transmission of microbiome from Mom to baby," she said. "We do think that likely is playing a big role in programming the offspring."

The question now becomes what the mechanism are behind the beneficial effect from the bacterial changes, Mattson said. The more beneficial bacteria produce different byproducts and those byproducts or metabolites "are really the key to whats happening downstream," he said. "So we are working to identify those molecules and how those molecules influence the biological function."

Being able to manipulate the microbiome has been the aim of a lot of research, Rao said.

"The big challenge, which has not been overcome to the best of my knowledge, is how do we change the gut microbiome?" he said.

Many of those efforts or interventions come after the person has already developed disease that might have its roots in earlier life, such as in obesity, Rao said.

"I think that is too late in the game," he said. "We need to really catch these youngsters, adolescents and so on, really at the very early stages."

In the case of the rat offspring, that will "start at the very beginning," Abais-Battad said.

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AU research: Switching to plant-based diet protects against heart disease - The Augusta Chronicle