How food compounds hijack the body's cellular messaging system
Lelong D, Payet T, Astier J, Sicard F, Landrier JF
Plant Signaling
The polyphenols in the berries and greens from your garden don't just get digested, they can hitch a ride inside microscopic vesicles that carry signals between your cells.
Cells constantly send each other tiny packages called extracellular vesicles, loaded with proteins, fats, and genetic material, to pass along instructions. This review pulls together evidence that things we eat, like polyphenols from fruits and vegetables, healthy fats, vitamins, and carotenoids, can change how many of these packages our cells make, what's inside them, and even act as passengers hitching a ride in them. Plants and gut bacteria also produce their own vesicles that we absorb when we eat them, meaning a salad might be delivering more than just calories.
Key Findings
Dietary bioactives can modulate biogenesis, release, and cargo composition of endogenous host-derived extracellular vesicles
Food compounds and their metabolites can be transported systemically by hitching a ride inside extracellular vesicles
Exogenous, diet-derived vesicles from plants and bacteria are absorbed and may deliver bioactive cargo directly
chevron_right Technical Summary
Nutrients and plant compounds in food can change tiny cell-to-cell messenger packets called extracellular vesicles, either by altering how our own cells make them or by riding inside vesicles that come straight from plants and bacteria we eat.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Food bioactives and extracellular vesicles: a narrative review.
Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are now recognized as key mediators of intercellular communication, transferring cargos such as proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids between cells and thereby influencin...
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