Rhonda Patrick· PhD
There's different strains of rodents that will overeat ketogenic diets. Like early studies before, some colleagues were feeding it and said, "This is not gonna work. They're hoarding the food. They're eating. They're getting blown up." There's like this is obesogenic, you know. So the high fat... There's a lot of high-fat diet research that detractors of ketogenic diet will point to and say, "This diet is...you know, causes all these bad things." But that's a westernized obesogenic high-fat diet. So, what Dr. Verdin used and Ramsey...so they did actually the study that I really wanted to do, and they probably did it better than I could ever do. They have really great molecular tools and everything, and they did it in a very clever way. From my understanding, they did... And the results were to be expected. You know, I think the results are what I would expect. So my understanding is that they did the cyclic ketogenic diet because, yeah, they didn't want them to gain weight, which could negate. So, I have to look to see what animal model they used, but the C57BL/6 mice will eat a ton of the ketogenic diet food, and they don't gain weight. Whereas other...depending upon the strain. And then we have the VMDk mice that we use for our cancer research, and they tend to... It corrects their eating behavior, meaning that if you give them a standard diet, ad libitum, they just gain weight like a couch potato. But a ketogenic diet, they will lose weight and everything improves. So they're like the other end. The C57BL/6 are kind of like athlete mice, I think, where the other models are more like sedentary mice. They are not as active.