RATS!! Science Has a Weight Problem!!

The authors of the new paper say that many lab rats may be overweight (theirs weighed up to two pounds, or twice what they should). Laugh if you want, but that's a real problem for science. Researchers are supposed to ensure that their animal models are as closely analogous to the average human as possible

Sounds like for the the most part they are, at least judging from the crowd at the local Walmart.

lol I wonder how much a rat has to eat to weigh 2 pounds? Sounds like a good meal for you Desert Rattler!! lol

This would be hilarious if it weren't so serious. I could write a book on rats, particularly their diets and exercise vs. genetics. Having bred thousands of rats just for pets and show, I can tell you that most rats are actually about a pound to 20 ounces in weight, with males being perhaps another 8 ounces greater (but male rats are naturally larger than the females). Toward the end of my involvement with rat-breeding, a new "type" was officially added to the show standard: the Jumbo. A true Jumbo weighed at least 2 pounds, but there was another requirement: the weight had to be a function of overall size, not just rolls of fat on an otherwise-normally-sized animal.

In the years that I bred rats, I ran into the occasional strain that was genetically obese. Actually, it was more of a mutation within a normal-sized strain, but I stumbled upon it by accident, when I had a pair of white rats that had a litter, one individual of which just got huge. I tried to put him on a diet, but that's really impossible unless you separate him from the colony. Nevertheless, I tried. I changed the diet of the entire cage, and, lo and behold, all the other rats remained unchanged while the fat one just lost ... fur.

Yes: fur. It may have been just one sampling, hardly scientific, but the conclusion I drew after returning the cage to the normal diet, was that the fatty used his limited caloric intake to be converted to fat, and with no calories left over for anything else, he had to sacrifice fur. Upon return to his normal diet his fur came back, too. It wasn't a happy ending, though. He died young of a heart attack. And there really was nothing I could have done. I couldn't have predicted the outcome.

Then there was Sparky. A friend had bred a litter of Champagne rats, and was all excited that they were huge, for babies. But there was one she just had to show me, so when they were weanable, she brought the litter over, and didn't have to point out the one that was huge: he was three times the size of his siblings! I fell in love, and she graciously gave him to me, and I named him Sparky.

At that time, there was a "Jumbo" ratty in the crowd we had, named "Squiggy." a genuine prize-winning show rat in the Jumbo category. Squiggy was huge, and weighed in at about 2 1/2 pounds at the time of his success as a show rat.

So, here comes Sparky, less than 30 days old and already approaching 10 ounces. In six months, with Squiggy a shade under 3 pounds, Sparky weighed in at exactly three pounds. There was a difference, though. Sparky wasn't a Jumbo. Sparky was fat. He was sweet, he was fat, and I knew his life would be cut short. He wasn't a part of a colony, so we did feed him as lean a diet as we could, but Sparky had simply inherited fat genes. He had a heart attack and died at the age of 1 1/2 years.

Obesity, regardless of species, is a problem compounded by stigma. Slim people see obese people and automatically ascribe the problem to laziness and over-indulgence in food, and science isn't much help. Science is determined to find a cause that would agree with common thought, but I'm betting that genetics plays more of a role than anyone wants to admit. Why? Because we all need a scapegoat, someone we can point at and make fun of without feeling guilty for doing so. Not all of us, for sure, but enough. Look at what Hollywood and the fashion industries are shoving down people's throats: anorexic skeletal wonders... we don't even know what qualifies as "normal" any longer. But, if Science would focus on genetic causes for obesity, here is one area where gene-therapy might actually make a huge difference.

Ooops... off the soapbox. Great article, Madame Snake.

The dismal lack of any really significant lack of really universally effective human weight control options - excluding those that don't addict us or kill us quickly - is a long term "hint" that human weight control is a complex and individual process almost certainly influenced by genetics.

When I reviewed the subject recently, saw not one realistic drug choice with any significant (in my own opinion) performance, and also see the myriad of books on the subject published each year, and the mass media advertisements constantly bombarding us, I see this as a major indicator that obesity is a huge "cash cow" for an entire industry, to include medicine.

And, since there are many, many different types of metabolic variants, trying to stay healthy and/or lose weight is almost a "Rubic's cube" for individuals to try to solve.

We really, really need some kind of "genetic analysis" so we can learn about our individual bodies needs and how to address various issues like weight control effectively on an individual basis.

But the potential for misuse of that individual genetic information is so huge, I almost shudder to think how it will be abused by those that have abused us all for so long already.....

I don't understand the problem!

Animals who are stand-ins for Americans should be fat, shouldn't they?

;-)