Primates and the American Diet

Lo and behold, it has the same effect on baboons as it does on Americans.  They get fat, they get diabetes, and they get heart disease.  Fructose and carbohydrates pretty much seal the deal, and are essential to causing these ill effects. 

"Dr. Grove and researchers at some other centers say the high-fructose corn syrup appears to accelerate the development of obesity and diabetes.

"'It wasn’t until we added those carbs that we got all those other changes, including those changes in body fat,' said Anthony G. Comuzzie, who helped create an obese baboon colony at the Southwest National Primate Research Center in San Antonio....

"Barbara C. Hansen of the University of South Florida said calories, but not high fat, were important. 'To suggest that humans and monkeys get fat because of a high-fat diet is not a good suggestion,' she said.

"Dr. Hansen, who has been doing research on obese monkeys for four decades, prefers animals that become naturally obese with age, just as many humans do. Fat Albert, one of her monkeys who she said was at one time the world’s heaviest rhesus, at 70 pounds, ate 'nothing but an American Heart Association-recommended diet,' she said."

They also spend a good amount of time quoting the idiots from PETA, who object to feeding baboons the American Heart Association diet, but in their perverse sense of "ethics" have no problem with people eating the same diet without any testing for efficacy at all. We can look around us and see how well that has gone...

But this is par for the course at the Times, unfortunately. The article is so confused and ill-written that it's only of limited use... They present a very contrary message on fat, for instance. Stephen Guyenet has pointed out that researchers often use corn oil as a high-fat diet, which is very misleadding.

And at the end the author notes that much of this research is moving to China, where the cowards at PETA won't have any influence.

Here's the story, and here's Dr. Davis' post where I found this.