>From:    Ingrid Bauer
>>Todd Moody wrote:
>>
>>Dr. Leibowitz showed that those rats that ate diets that were more
>>than 40 percent fat had twice as much galanin...
>
>I would be curious about which kind of fats were given to the rats.

One thing that animal researchers apparently fail to account for is
the dissimilarities in biochemistry between rats and humans. Rats
make endogenous ascorbate; humans do not. The same goes for a
uricase enzyme, the lack of which predisposes some humans to gout.
That this is true is widely accepted (duh), but still researchers
persist in treating rats like little humans, making broad and
often sensational announcements based on... rodents.

Even using the guinea pig, which has a closer blood chemistry than
rats, is problematic due to the different clearing times of drugs
etc. as compared to humans. One of the criticisms of of a recent
researcher of GM potatoes was that rat's biochemistry is indeed very
different, and that rats do not normally eat potatoes, being toxic
when raw -- as every Paleo adherent knows.

So the gist here is that equating rats to humans in this way
will probably lead incautious people and public down the wrong
path. Forget about rats and stick to direct human observation.