‘Fat Cat’ Helps Study Human Obesity?

A new study has shown that fat cats can be a great help in understanding the effects of gut bacteria on human health. This is what the health and medical webzine Health Day reported on the 19th (local time) based on a paper by American researchers published in Scientific Reports.

Diet-related changes in the gut microbiome of obese cats bear striking similarities to the way diet affects the human gut, the researchers report. Pet cats could therefore be a great source of information about the human microbiome and whether altering gut bacteria could help fight obesity, the researchers say.

“Cats are a great model for studying the microbiome as a treatment for obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other conditions,” said study lead author Genessa Winston, a professor of clinical veterinary medicine at Ohio State University. “Pets share our beds and ice cream with us,” she said. “This supports the idea that companion animals can serve as natural disease models that are exposed to environments similar to those of humans.”

The researchers fed seven obese cats a rigorous diet for 16 weeks, which ranged from free-range cat food to a special weight-loss diet to a calorie-restricted weight-loss diet.

The researchers found that cats that lost weight on a calorie-restricted diet had increased levels of a short-chain fatty acid called propionic acid in their fecal samples. Propionic acid has been shown to help control appetite, reduce fat accumulation, and prevent obesity and diabetes in other mammals. This increase in propionic acid was linked to an increase in the gut bacteria Prevotella 9 copri.

“When cats are put on a special diet designed for weight loss, their propionic acid goes up and stays high, and then when they go back to their normal diet, it goes back down,” Winston said. “So it’s really a change in diet.” He said. “What this paper shows is that when you restrict calories in obese cats, you can change their microbial ecosystem, and it’s likely that this change in ecosystem is related to some metabolic outcome.”

These results also suggest that the observed changes in gut bacteria in companion cats could provide meaningful information about how diet might affect the human gut microbiome, Winston said. “The microbes we saw in this study have shown up again and again in human studies,” he said, “which is significant, given that people obviously don’t eat cat food.”

Professor Wiston is currently conducting two large-scale clinical trials exploring the potential of fecal transplants to help overweight dogs and cats lose weight. The weight loss cat food used in the studies and the funding for the research were provided by Nestlé Purina.

The paper can be found at the following link (