I haven't had my Diet Wars writing published before, unless you count my many letters to the editors of The Herald, Listener, and Otago Daily Times, letters which, I'm pleased to say, do often get published.
This is the first hard copy of an article that wasn't just a response to some piece of stupidity in the press.
It was commissioned for inclusion in the first edition of the free Café Reader. This will hopefully be available in every café in New Zealand. Apart from my polemic, it also contains writing from the finest local talent. I opened it at random (after checking my piece for typos, phew!) and Simon Sweetman's party piece is the funniest thing I've read in ages. Put together by Phantom Billstickers, thanks to Jim and Kelly Wilson and no doubt other committed team members that I haven't had dealings with.
And there we have it. I will reprint the whole article in a few weeks for overseas readers.
Meanwhile, some exciting science news; expert scienticians have finally invented a high-fat diet diet that DOESN'T produce fatty liver in Wistar rats, even with prodigious overfeeding!
Long term highly saturated fat diet does not induce NASH in Wistar rats
Background
Understanding of nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) is hampered by the lack of a suitable model. Our aim was to investigate whether long term high saturated-fat feeding would induce NASH in rats.
Methods
21 day-old rats fed high fat diets for 14 weeks, with either coconut oil or butter, and were compared with rats feeding a standard diet or a methionine choline-deficient (MCD) diet, a non physiological model of NASH.
Results
MCDD fed rats rapidly lost weight and showed NASH features. Rats fed coconut (86% of saturated fatty acid) or butter (51% of saturated fatty acid) had an increased caloric intake (+143% and +30%). At the end of the study period, total lipid ingestion in term of percentage of energy intake was higher in both coconut (45%) and butter (42%) groups than in the standard (7%) diet group. No change in body mass was observed as compared with standard rats at the end of the experiment. However, high fat fed rats were fattier with enlarged white and brown adipose tissue (BAT) depots, but they showed no liver steatosis and no difference in triglyceride content in hepatocytes, as compared with standard rats. Absence of hepatic lipid accumulation with high fat diets was not related to a higher lipid oxidation by isolated hepatocytes (unchanged ketogenesis and oxygen consumption) or hepatic mitochondrial respiration but was rather associated with a rise in BAT uncoupling protein UCP1 (+25–28% vs standard).
Conclusion
Long term high saturated fat feeding led to increased "peripheral" fat storage and BAT thermogenesis but did not induce hepatic steatosis and NASH.
The full text paper is here.