If I add lard, or coconut oil, or sucrose or starch into my rat's diet will it be palatable for the rats? What are the common sources of fat and carbohydrates in purified diets for high fat diets for rats?
Dear Prabhakaran
Please find attached a file detailing all the nutritional requirement of rats
Another file attached here from American Institute of Nutrition on rat diet and its composition.
when we added fructose to the drinking water or rats, they drank much more as compared to controls on tap water. at the same time, they reduced the consumption of feed (pellets) quite impressively (down to 66% after 6 weeks, down to 54% after 30 weeks compared to control group on tap water) - Therefore, the effect on bodyweight was rather small. Clear evidence they liked the sweet drinks much better than there standard chow.
;-) and possibly that those rats were smarter than humans - I am not aware that softdrinks with much sugar make people significantly reduce the size of their meals.
regarding your question, did the rats get diabetes:
I never looked for diabetes – I was looking for enhancement of carcinogenesis by fructose – by the various effects that fructose has on the carbohydrate metabolism of the liver. There is some, evidence, however, that frucose in this study did more than effect liver carcinogenesis only. Surprisingly, we found an increase in neoplastic nodules the the pancreas – not islet cells, but exocrine. Details are in
(Dietary fructose enhances the development of atypical acinar cell nodules in the pancreas of rats pretreated with N-nitrosomorpholine. )
H Enzmann, T Dettler, D Ohlhauser, H Stumpf, P Bannasch
Archiv für Geschwulstforschung 02/1990; 60(4):283-7, for abstract see my ResearchGate page.
But health effects of high fructose diet is a very current issue – I assume someone did look what happens if rats get exceeding amounts of fructose over a long period, if they get diabetes in the end…
Kevin Boyd contributed to a previous discussion on fructose and may be more knowledable about this?
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