A highly saturated fat-rich diet is more obesogenic than diets with lower saturated fat content
and is looking at this graph:
Again, this post is pure speculation. I don't even know if the lab had a janitor.
The red oval highlights a serious "That's odd" moment. With this sort of finding you can
a) Say "That's odd" and think about investigating it based on what probably happened.
b) Report it, accept that you have no idea what it is all about and say so.
c) Pretend it didn't happen, but leave the anomaly in the graph without mentioning it in the results or discussion.
d) Falsify the data.
To their credit the group took option c), as far as I can glean after making myself read the results and skim-read the discussion section. The didn't take option d), to their slight credit.
Why do I find this so interesting?
Because rats, subjected to a 40% reduction (down to 165kJ/d) in available calories from their preferred calorie intake (270kJ/d) quite suddenly, after about 10 days of clearing the food hopper, started to leave some of the full (but small) amount of offered food.
In real terms this means that, suddenly, they weren't hungry. During a 40% calorie restriction.
Just think about that.
Nothing at all is reported to have changed at the time point of the sudden drop in hunger.
Oooooh, now that's a challenge if ever I saw one. The change was transient and the rats were almost back to clearing their hopper at the time they were executed ("euthanised" under CO2 anaesthesia).
Aside: If you have an anaesthetic machine with a CO2 regulator and a cylinder of CO2 you can easily dial a 50:50 mixture of CO2:O2 and try inhaling it. I would suggest that is no fun. No fun at all. I guess the study's ethics committee have never tried this. Maybe they don't have an anaesthetic machine with a CO2 regulator to try it with. The way I used to have. End aside.
Anyhoo. Here's a Powerpoint of lines popping up on diagrams.
TLDW?
The janitor turned up the heating. Day 109.
Peter
PS this wouldn't work in humans, not even transiently. We're too big, we live very close to our thermoneutral point compared to rats.
Links to papers briefly used in the presentation.
Mouse EE graph from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26042200/
Mouse to rat EE conversion from
