> 2. Is the diet a realistic diet? Are the mice or rats eating a significant amount more of palmitic acid than what would be reasonable in a human participant?

> 2. Is the diet a realistic diet? Are the mice or rats eating a significant amount more of palmitic acid than what would be reasonable in a human participant? I'll have to go digging for it, but I want to comment on something this reminds me of. Someone a few months ago linked me to a study that showed that MCT oil caused weight gain in mice (might have been rats?), despite how MCT oil is known to be much less fattening than other fats based on how it's metabolized. If eaten in great enough abundance it may even cause weight loss. Having learned my lesson from just relying on the abstract, I found the full text for the study using Sci-Hub; the diet fed to both groups of mice was a high sucrose diet, the experimental group having more MCT oil than the other. The experimental group had less weight gain than the control group. I'm pretty sure that detail was entirely left out of the abstract. My point is that this person was trying to persuade me that MCT can "still cause weight gain" even though the study they linked to contradicted their conclusion, including the conclusion of the study itself. EDIT: I think it was this one, although I'm not sure this is of interest to anyone here, but whatever: https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpendo.00200.2018?rfr_dat=cr_pub++0pubmed&url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori%3Arid%3Acrossref.org# https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpendo.002... Honestly, when people read studies and jump to conclusions, I have to assume that most of the time they're just trying to appear clever and are counting on the fact that few people are willing to actually read the full study. Worse yet, journalists have a terrible track record in my experience. I've lost count of how many referenced studies I looked up that either contradicted the journalist's conclusion or didn't have any mention of what they were even talking about. > 4. What are the systemic effects? People don't eat fatty acids alone, they eat them as (ideally) part of a diet composed of whole foods. Might the effect hold in a realistic diet with more palmitic acid? Also this. How the diet interacts with the Randle cycle can change how these nutrients are ultimately handled. Palm oil in the diet may have no appreciable negative effect until you start eating it along with sugar in the form of things like Oreos and Twinkies (or sucrose-laden mice chow).