Dietary intervention & immunity: underlying mechanisms and future directions

BACKGROUND: Dietary intervention has emerged as a key strategy not only for health control but also for disease treatment. Growing evidence indicates that dietary interventions (including caloric restriction, intermittent fasting, time-restricted feeding, fasting-mimicking diet, and ketogenic diet) significantly influence immune homeostasis and orchestrate immune responses, offering potential as adjuvant therapies in autoimmune diseases, cancer, and other immune-related conditions. AIM OF REVIEW: This review systematically examines how different dietary interventions modulate immune cell development, metabolism, and function, with a focus on the underlying molecular mechanisms and their potential implications for immune-related diseases. KEY SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTS OF REVIEW: The advances on dietary intervention have yielded new insights on the treatment of immune-related diseases. However, theeffects of dietary intervention on the immune system and their underlying mechanisms remain incompletely elucidated. A comprehensive understanding of these aspects will undoubtedly provide a powerful impetus for developing novel strategies for clinical disease treatment. Herein, we update the current understanding of the effects of dietary intervention on the immune system. In particular, we emphasize the underlying mechanism of dietary intervention in modulating immune cell development and immune responses. Finally, we carefully discuss the critical unresolved issues, along with the challenges in developing targeted clinical therapies, aiming to provide a theoretical framework for the application of dietary intervention strategies to regulate the immune system in pathological or physiological states.