Long term high-fat diet expands waistline and shrinks brain | Hacker News Reader

Long term high-fat diet expands waistline and shrinks brain

unisa.edu.au

15 pointsvoisin16 comments

Click bait title. Actual paper title: Long term high fat diet induces metabolic disorders and aggravates behavioral disorders and cognitive deficits in MAPT P301L transgenic mice.

In mice.

Also, without being able to see the actual paper at this point, there's no way to draw any conclusion from this whatsoever. After all, how do we know what composed this high-fat chow fed to the mice? I've seen other studies where both the control group and the high-fat group were fed chow that contained substantial amounts of sucrose.

Also, in some studies a high fat rat diet is 50% carbs and 50% fat

By mass or calorie?

Also fat quality issues.

You can feed mice rancid seed oil.

Or delicious, grass fed beef tallow.

actual paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11011-022-01029-x

Not sure why the paper was flagged.

>Not sure why the paper was flagged.

Do you mean the flagging of the original post? It looks like folks feel the title of the submission here was inaccurate/click-bait and not an appropriate summary of the paper.

How does this fit in with the fact that high-fat low carbohydrate diet is used to help treat conditions such as epilepsy? I'm talking about the ketogenic diet here. Seems they omit the high-carb part in "high-fat diets". Do mice have similar metabolism to humans? I know they're used to study a lot of things before human trials, are our metabolisms similar? If you're low-fat high-carb you go into ketosis. Do mice do that as well?

Good question! Your brain needs sugar to run, so it's not surprising that a high-fat diet might stress it. Especially in mice.

Our livers can produce ketone bodies as a replacement for sugar. Can mice?

It's also, of course, possible that a ketogenic diet helps counter diabetes while still being less healthy than a better rounded diet would be for someone not diabetic.

> If you're low-fat high-carb you go into ketosis.

Is that backwards?

Yes, yes it is

this study did not use a low carb diet. The feed was roughly 1/3 lard and 1/3 sugar by weight.

So I was interested whether the high fat diet (HFD) was a low carb diet or a high carb diet. The paper lists carbs for the low fat diet but not the high fat diet.

In the paper the HFD is said to be SF04-001 High Fat Rodent Diet by Specialty Feeds, data sheet here (https://www.specialtyfeeds.com/new/wp-content/uploads/2016/0...). The data sheet also does not list the carbs, which I found strange. So I looked at the ingredients list: Here are the top three by weight: Casein (Acid) 233 g/Kg; Sucrose 201 g/Kg Lard 207 g/Kg.

Sucrose (aka table sugar) definitely has carbs. Sugar is about 1 carb per 1 gram sugar, and each carb is about 4 kcalories. So about 800 kcal per kilogram from sugar. Lard has about 9 kcals per gram. I may be wrong, but this surely does not reflect a high fat low carb diet.

I'm not an expert in this field, but I think its likely that the body wants to be either carnivore highfat low carb mode, or a herbivore low fat medium to high carb mode, and the omnivore flexibility comes at a cost to long term health.

Misleading title.

In this study (in mice), a high-fat diet led to diabetes, and diabetes led to Alzheimer's.

It doesn't state that a high-fat diet will lead to Alzheimer's in humans.

Anyone else see the baked egg and bacon in the avocado and think, wow I want to try that!

I can feel my brain shrinking and waistline expanding just looking at it.

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