A seemingly outlandish bit of research from South Korea claims that kimchi may work against bird flu.
I've come up with a potential mechanism. Spicy food promotes inflammation. A recent study demonstrated that inflammation can boost CC chemokine sensitivity in rats.
CCL5 is in fact a CC chemokine. In an earlier post, I noted that CCL5 had potential against influenza.
Thus, spicy food may be amplifying existing immune response mechanisms and give the organism an edge against influenze infection. This is highly speculative, but worth exploring. Being able to upregulate and downregulate chemokine and cytokine production may be key techniques in the future.
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