Brown seaweed Sargassum siliquosum as an intervention for diet-induced obesity in male Wistar rats
Citation
Export citationdu Preez, R., Magnusson, M., Majzoub, M. E., Thomas, T., Praeger, C., Glasson, C. R. K., … Brown, L. (2021). Brown seaweed Sargassum siliquosum as an intervention for diet-induced obesity in male Wistar rats. Nutrients, 13(6), 1754–1754. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu13061754
Permanent Research Commons link: https://hdl.handle.net/10289/14344
Abstract
The therapeutic potential of Sargassum siliquosum grown in Australian tropical waters was tested in a rat model of metabolic syndrome. Forty-eight male Wistar rats were divided into four groups of 12 rats and each group was fed a different diet for 16 weeks: corn starch diet (C); high-carbohydrate, high-fat diet (H) containing fructose, sucrose, saturated and trans fats; and C or H diets with 5% S. siliquosum mixed into the food from weeks 9 to 16 (CS and HS). Obesity, hypertension, dyslipidaemia, impaired glucose tolerance, fatty liver and left ventricular fibrosis developed in H rats. In HS rats, S. siliquosum decreased body weight (H, 547 ± 14; HS, 490 ± 16 g), fat mass (H, 248 ± 27; HS, 193 ± 19 g), abdominal fat deposition and liver fat vacuole size but did not reverse cardiovascular and liver effects. H rats showed marked changes in gut microbiota compared to C rats, while S. siliquosum supplementation increased gut microbiota belonging to the family Muribaculaceae. This selective increase in gut microbiota likely complements the prebiotic actions of the alginates. Thus, S. siliquosum may be a useful dietary additive to decrease abdominal and liver fat deposition.
Date
2021Type
Publisher
MDPI AG
Rights
© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).