Scientists have a new tool in the fight against obesity — ‘fat cats’

Fat cats. They’re great pets, internet famous and, according to a new study, possibly the next big thing in obesity research.

Published in Scientific Reports, the study discovered our feline friends could help scientists better understand gut microbiomes and how they affect obesity in people.

“Animals share our beds,” lead study author Jenessa Winston, assistant professor of veterinary clinical sciences at Ohio State University, said in a news release. “They share our ice cream. There are all these things that people do with their pets that highlight they are a naturally occurring disease model with similar environmental exposures as humans.”

Veterinary researchers analyzed waste samples from “fat cats” as the felines lost weight through controlled dietary changes. The results revealed a striking similarity to cat and human gut microbiomes when concerning food and how it affects microbes.

“Being able to see changes in cats that come up in the context of obesity and Type 2 diabetes in people makes them a really good model to start looking at more microbiome-directed therapeutics for obesity in humans if we’re seeing a similar shift,” Winston added. “Microbes we saw in this study also come up again and again in human studies — and clearly, people aren’t eating cat chow, right?”

The study featured seven obese cats, which were put on four-phase diets over a 16-week period. From free-feeding commercial cat food to chowing down on specially formulated meals to calorie-restriction and back, the cats showed promising results.

“When the cats are on the special diet formulated for weight loss, propionic acid goes up and stays high, and then goes back down when they’re put back on the maintenance diet. So it really is a dietary change,” Winston said. “This paper highlights that when we calorie-restrict cats that are obese, we can alter their microbial ecosystem — and those community shifts that we see likely correlate with some metabolic outcomes.

In developed countries, roughly 63% of cats are obese. According to the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 40% of adults and around 20% of children are obese. In 2019, obesity accounted for $173 billion in U.S. health care costs.

“Many adults with obesity have other serious chronic diseases,” the CDC reported. “For example, 58% of U.S. adults with obesity have high blood pressure, a risk factor for heart disease. Also, approximately 23% of U.S. adults with obesity have diabetes.

“Health care for obesity is expensive for patients and the health care system,” it continued. “In 2019 dollars, annual medical costs for adults with obesity were $1,861 higher per person than adults with healthy weight. For adults with severe obesity, the excess costs were $3,097 per person. This accounts for nearly $173 billion in medical expenditures in 2019 dollars.”

Tribune News Service