Effect of Cholesterol Enriched or Fatty-Acid Diets on Cholesterol and Lipid Levels in Young Wistar Rats

Nutritional intake is a fundamental determinant of health. It is well known that cholesterol rich diets can induce several pathological conditions but detailed mechanism underlying these remains unknown. Wistar rats, an animal strain widely used in the research have been employed to study the effects of dietary interventions due to their metabolic characteristics, which are closer to the human compared to mice. The effect of some components of the western diet, combined with cholesterol in the lipid profile have been studied, but the impact of only cholesterol or fatty-acid diets in such a profile has not been yet characterized. Here we measured the effect of 6 or 16 weeks of dietary intervention with cholesterol enriched diet (CED) or fatty-acid diet (FAD) on cholesterol, triglyceride levels, high density lipoproteins (HDL) and low density lipoproteins (LDL). We observed significant differences in body weight only in animals treated with CED or FAD from Week 9 onwards as compared to animals fed the control diet. There were no differences between animals fed with CED or FAD in cholesterol levels at any time point nevertheless, triglyceride levels were significantly increased as compared to control diet in animals under both diets at early time points. Finally, both CED and FAD induced a decrease in HDL as compared to control levels in treatments of more than 6 weeks, whereas LDL transiently increased in animals treated with FAD from 10 to 12 weeks, but after this period LDL levels returned to baseline, suggesting that young rats have a compensatory effect at least for the period of time analyzed here. Here we provide a temporal course on lipid profile of cholesterol, triglycerides, HDL and LDH in Wistar rats treated with CED and FAD diet that can be useful as reference for future studies.