Abstract
It has long been known that the diets high in fat cause a marked increase in the neutral fat of the liver. Best and his coworkers 1 , 2 have shown that this can be prevented or cured in the rat by administration of choline. Moderately fatty livers were produced by these workers when they fed rats exclusively on sucrose or on any other choline-free diets. Cholesterol in doses of 100 mg. daily had a similar effect. This change was found to be preventable, however, by the administration of as little as 5 mg. of choline daily. It has been shown by Schonheimer and Yuasa, 3 and confirmed by Page and Menschick, 4 Okey, 5 Chanutin and Ludewig, 6 Sperry and Stoyanoff, 7 and others, that cholesterol feeding causes a marked increase in the cholesterol of the liver. Chanutin and Ludewig found that added carbohydrate accelerated while fat inhibited the deposition of cholesterol in the liver of cholesterol-fed rats. Little attention appears to have been given to the phospholipid fraction in the liver under the various conditions mentioned, except for the finding by Chanutin and Ludewig that lecithin remained normal after cholesterol feeding. The specific effects of high-protein diets in this connection have not been recorded.
The results presented here supplement previous studies by supplying data on these points. The analyses reported were carried out on livers from rats used in a previously reported series of experiments on the influence of diet and other factors on the lipid content of the brain. 3 Four rats from our own stock colonies were placed at the age of 3 weeks on each of the following special regimens:
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