MOSCOW, August 6 Diets help improve the condition of the liver by slowing down oxidative processes that are dangerous for cells, but dietary restrictions, on the contrary, are ineffective in treating bile stasis. This is the conclusion reached by a group of Russian scientists. The results of the study, supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (RSF), were published in the journal Antioxidants, the RSF press service reported.
Stagnation of bile in the liver — cholestasis — is a common disease that leads to organ damage: cell death, inflammation, swelling and, as a result, to disruption of its functioning, the report says.
Some scientists, according to experts, promote the idea that the condition of people with cholestasis can be alleviated with the help of diets: intermittent fasting and reducing the daily calorie intake. However, the effectiveness of this method remains unproven.
Researchers from Lomonosov Moscow State University, the B.V. Petrovsky Russian Scientific Center of Surgery, and the K.I. Skryabin Moscow State Academy of Veterinary Medicine and Biotechnology studied the effect of diets on the liver of laboratory animals.
To do this, the authors used 28 male rats, half of which had their bile ducts tied, thereby disrupting the outflow of bile from the liver and simulating cholestasis. Then all the animals were divided into three groups: in the first, the rats ate as usual, in the second, they followed intermittent fasting (24 hours of fasting and 24 hours of full feeding), and in the third, they consumed 35% fewer calories than their standard daily diet.
The experiment showed that when following a diet, the activity of oxidative processes in the liver of animals without cholestasis, leading to damage to cell membranes and death of liver cells — hepatocytes, decreased by 1.5 times. This indicates the effectiveness of dietary restrictions in preventing the disease.
However, if cholestasis has already developed, the diet has neither a positive nor a negative effect on the liver, so doctors should not recommend intermittent fasting and a reduction in the calorie content of the diet to patients with such disorders, the scientists emphasized.
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«With cholestasis, the main cause of liver cell damage is oxidative stress. Our study has shown that in the absence of the disease, diets have an antioxidant effect. However, if they are started already with cholestasis, they will not be effective. Perhaps this is due to the fact that bile stagnation disrupts the biochemical processes in the organ so much that dietary adjustments cannot compensate for this,» the Russian Science Foundation quotes the words of the project leader, head of the laboratory of the structure and function of mitochondria at the A.N. Belozersky Institute of Physical and Chemical Biology of Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov Yegor Plotnikov.
He added that scientists are now faced with the task of conducting more detailed research to develop detailed effective nutrition protocols.
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