If you are allergic to peanuts, milk products, or strawberries, you usually blame your immune system for this unfortunate reaction. But when people enjoy a varied diet without any troublesome reaction, they generally don’t realize that this is thanks to their immune system.
Our ability to ingest chicken, meat, or tomatoes, for example – which constitute material foreign to the body and could have been a hostile invader – is due to the immune mechanism known as oral tolerance. Though this tolerance is vital for our survival, how it works had remained puzzling despite years of research.
Now, a new study entitled “A coordinated cellular network regulates tolerance to food,” published in the prestigious journal Nature by Dr. Ranit Kedmi and her team at the Department of Systems Immunology