Monday, March 12, 2012

Why We Get Fat ... Lessons from Obese Humans & Cafeteria Rats

Vacation bump!  Original Post Date:  3/9/11



One of the more interesting things (to me) to come out of the "cafeteria rat study" is what the composition of the diet eventually chosen by the rats came out to be.  I'm just going to focus on the SC (standard chow) and CAF (SC + human snack foods) diets in this post.

To recap, the SC had a composition F/C/P of 10/64/26.  When offered this chow along with a rotating selection of three human snack foods from the following list, the rats only ate 15% of their diet as chow (the wording of this is unclear, but their total consumption is ultimately what's important).  The composition of the diet they ended up eating?  CAF was F/C/P of 44/46/10  (note: I've detected slight discrepancies in the numbers here that involve a 1-2% swing in either direction) .  One might think the rodies were only offered fatty snacks, but this is not the case as can be seen in the table below:
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