Comparing the metabolic fates of BALB/c mice maintained on cafeteria-style diets with differential nutritive values

Cafeteria (CAF) diet-fed rodents are shown to provide a robust model of metabolic syndrome and human obesity. The carbohydrate/fat-rich food-items provided to the CAF-diet-model more closely approximate the ultra-processed human diet. However, most of the previous studies applied the commercially available rodent chow-diet for the comparative analyses and labeled it as a healthy-diet. The presented work aims to extend the knowledge on CAF-diet model by exposing the mice to human foods with different nutritional values. Our major goal was to study the metabolic fates of mice maintained on human food-items, which depending upon on their macronutrient compositions are categorized as healthy or unhealthy. BALB/c mice were randomly allocated to one of the three dietary intervention groups, standard chow diet; high-sugar/high-fat-cafeteria (HSHF-CAF) diet; or low-sugar/low-fat-cafeteria (LSLF-CAF) diet, for 5 weeks. The differences in multiple metabolic parameters (including food-/energy /macronutrient-intake, body-weight gain rate, organ-to-body weight ratios, plasma lipid profiles, adipocyte physiology, lipid deposition in metabolic tissues and ectopic fat storage in heart and kidney) were compared among the three intervention groups. We did not observe hyperphagia in mice maintained on CAF-diets. Nonetheless, the CAF-diet-fed mice displayed increased weight-gain-rate, adiposity, and adipocyte hypertrophy when compared to the chow-fed mice. However, the mice maintained on the two cafeteria-style diets displayed similar metabolic profiles, with HSHF-CAF-group displaying slightly higher weight-gain-rate. The HSHF-CAF-and LSLF-CAF-diet induced comparable adiposity in BALB/c mice. Further studies, with longer dietary intervention periods, are required to elucidate the effects of differential CAF-diets on the metabolic health of mice.