Quick Study Analysis: What Diseases Do Seed Oils Cause?
This is part of a series of papers I've been gathering on the overview of seed oils and chronic disease: What does the research tell us about which diseases are involved?
Reposting the entire series here as one long post for paid subscribers.
You can find the original 5 pieces above for free.
D12492 is the most widely-used experimental diet to induce obesity. I’ve discussed it a number of times in the past, most notably in my big overview of what causes obesity:
But more recently here:
D12492 is great because it’s used in so many studies that the obesogenic component has been clearly isolated via a variety of methodologies—see above, but also here:
In a nutshell, if you remove the linoleic acid from a diet like D12492, and replace it with, say, sugar, saturated fat, or synthetic trans-fat, you get a diet that is less obesogenic (Alvheim, 2012, Kubant, 2015). There are a few other ways of skinning this cat, using different methods (surgery, drugs, genetic modification) but they all boil down to linoleic acid being the ingredient that causes obesity.
Physicians know this as well. If you ask a physician to prescribe something to make you gain weight, it’s a formula similar to D12492: seed oils and other stuff (Abbott, 2020).
So one could (and I have) spend lots of time reading various different papers and connecting the dots. But it’s tedious. To do, and to write about.
So I love seeing papers that do all the hard work. In this paper, they examine what happens when you give a specific type of mouse D12492’s less-bad older brother, D12451:
“The genesis of D12492 traces back to its predecessor, D12451, formulated in 1996 with a fat content of 45 kcal%. However, the scientific community needed a diet with even higher fat in the hope of accelerating and intensifying the onset of the obesity phenotype…”
So D12451 is just a less-obesogenic version of D12492. What effects does D12451 have?
“Translational Characterization of the Temporal Dynamics of Metabolic Dysfunctions in Liver, Adipose Tissue and the Gut During Diet-Induced NASH Development in Ldlr-/-.Leiden Mice” (Gart, 2023; all quotes are from here unless otherwise noted.)
Boy, that’s a mouthful, but it just means they put mice in a cage and fed them junk food, and watched what happened.
(NASH is non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, a more-advanced state of NAFLD. For the experienced readers out there, these are 94% the standard C57BL/6J mice, with a cross to knock out their LDL receptor.)
