Impact of Dietary nanoparticles on the composition and function of the gut microbiota in mice - impact of long-term ingestion (24 weeks)

Nanotechnologies provide new opportunities for improving the safety, quality, shelf life, flavor and aspect of foods. The most common dietary nanoparticles (NPs) are silver present in some food packaging, and silicon and titanium dioxides both used as additives. The rapid development and commercialization of consumer products containing engineered NPs is, however, not sufficiently supported by toxicological studies and risk assessment. Disruption of the gut microbiota (GM) and/or local and systemic toxicity have already been observed after oral administration of NPs in experimental animals, but results are not consistent, and doses used were often much higher than the currently estimated human intakes. In view of the strong evidence that links alterations of the GM to cardiometabolic (CM) diseases, we hypothesized that food NPs might disturb this GM-CM axis. Thus, we assessed in male C57BL/6JRj mice the impact of long-term ingestion (24 weeks) of Ag (0, 4, 40 or 400 µg/kg pellet), SiO2 (0, 0.8, 8 and 80 mg/kg pellet) or TiO2 (0, 0.4, 4 or 40 mg/kg pellet) NPs on the GM and CM status. The reversibility of the effects was examined after 8 additional weeks without NPs intake (recovery period).