The Influence of Dietary Fibre-rich Meals on Gene Expression in Leukocytes and Postprandial Glucose and Lipid Response in Healthy Subjects

Dietary fiber has long been known to give beneficial health effects. Yet, the understanding of how fiber-rich meals regulate molecular events at a gene level is limited. Also, few studies have compared the effects of different fiber sources on postprandial responses and hardly any study the effects of fiber mixtures in the same meal, even though this is more similar to regular eating habits.

Healthy subjects will come to the study center after an overnight fast, to ingest breakfasts randomly enriched with different fiber. The meals contains either spray-dried oat drink, rye bran, sugar beet fiber a mixture of these three fibers, oat bran or no added fiber (control). All meals are adjusted to contain the same total amount of available carbohydrates and fat. Blood leukocytes for gene expression profiling were taken before and 2 h after consumption while blood samples for analysis of postprandial glucose, insulin and triglyceride levels were taken every 30 min during 3 h.

NuGO Affymetrix Human Genechip NuGO_Hs1a520180 are used for the microarray analysis and analysis is performed with linear mixed models and enrichment analysis to identify functional gene sets that responded to the specific oat bran effect.