How To Fatten A Mammal

Intro To Oxidation / By / August 15, 2023

This video serves as a sort of road map of Fire In A Bottle topics. On the blog and video series I’ve drilled into numerous topics and their relationship with obesity: PUFA, MUFA, The ROS Theory of Obesity, reductive stress, D6D, SCD1, the AhR, PPAR alpha, etc.

Sometimes it’s useful to zoom out and see the forest. This video serves as a roadmap with squirrels and oak trees serving as the central characters. The oaks need to squirrels to spread their seeds. Also known as acorns. The squirrels need to fatten up for winter.

Black and red oak acorns have evolved to be perfectly fattening. The percent of calories break down as:

Acorn (% of Cals)High-Fat DietCroissant
Carbohydrate483547
Protein6.6208
Fat464545
MUFA272012
PUFA1281

In red oak acorns, fat provides 46% of calories with 27% of calories as MUFA and 12% as PUFA, leaving only 7% of calories as saturated fat. This is remarkably similar (although lower in protein) to the “High-Fat Diet” that is consistently used to create obesity and insulin resistance in lab rats. On the other hand, acorns are much higher in MUFA and PUFA than the butter croissants that have kept the French lean.

This video explains why the acorns have chosen this particular composition to fatten squirrels from a molecular perspective. References are below.

References

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