WIKIMEDIA, SCHUMINWEBHigh-fat diets are ubiquitous in rodent research. Scientists feed mice high-fat diets to study the impact of nutrition on diabetes, cancer, and heart disease, and to better understand obesity itself. Companies including Purina, BioServ, Research Diets, Envigo (formerly Harlan Teklad), and CLEA Japan sell standardized high-fat and control diets, making it simple to include high-fat diets in study designs.
But less often do researchers stop to ask what’s actually in the high-fat and control diets they are using, and how rodent nutritional research corresponds to human nutritional research. In recent years, for instance, studies have indicated that fat is far from the lone culprit in human weight gain, and that carbohydrates play a hefty role. “Mice are a good model for human obesity . . . but it seems to me that, for diet, the mouse literature has gone off track,” said Craig Warden, who studies the genetics of body fat accumulation at the University of California, Davis.
What’s in a high-fat diet?
When high-fat mouse diets originated, feeding animals fat seemed like an obvious way to make them gain weight. “What likely happened ...
