A pilot study was conducted of males 40-45 years old from rural areas of three countries to study the long-term effects of dietary fats on the lipids of plasma, red blood cells (RBCs), and platelets. Differences were observed in cholesterol and phospholipid levels of plasma. Total phospholipids of RBCs and platelets were similar in all three countries. The pattern of individual phospholipids of RBCs in the Finnish and Italian samples differed from the American samples. In all plasma and RBC glycerolphospholipids, the monounsaturated fatty acids were highest in the Italian and the saturated fatty acids were highest in the Finnish samples; PUFAs were highest in the USA samples. Platelet glycerolphospholipids followed similar fatty acid patterns. We concluded that the fatty acid compositions of the glycerolphospholipids of plasma, RBCs, and platelets reflect the major dietary fatty acids.
We examined the effect of dietary alpha-linolenic acid (ALA) on the indices of immunocompetence in 10 healthy free-living men (age 21-37 y) who consumed all meals at the Western Human Nutrition Research Center for 126 d. There was a stabilization period of 14 d at the start when all 10 subjects consumed basal diet (BD) and there were two intervention periods of 56 d each. Five of the subjects consumed the basal diet and the other five consumed flax-seed-oil diet (FD) during each intervention period. Feeding of FD suppressed the proliferation of peripheral blood mononuclear cells when they were cultured with phytohemagglutinin-P (P = 0.041) and concanavalin A (P = 0.054) and the delayed hypersensitivity response to seven recall antigens (NS). Concentrations of immunoglobulins in serum, C3, C4, salivary IgA, the numbers of helper cells, suppressor cells, and total T and B cells in the peripheral blood were not affected by the diets.
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