According a new research, a high-fat diet can be bad for your health and a snack-based “cafeteria”-style diet of highly palatable, energy-dense foods is even worse. A study by researchers at the University of North Carolinaat Chapel Hill found that rats that ate snack foods commonly consumed by children and adults in the U.S. ate more, gained more weight, had more tissue inflammation and were intolerant to glucose and insulin (warning signs of diabetes) than rats whose diets were high fat from lard.

The study which became the cover story of the June 2011 issue of the journal “Obesity,” showed that the “cafeteria diet” (an experimental system for studying obesity, also known as CAF, that mimics buffet-style access to junk food such as cookies, chips and processed meats) contributed more to diet-induced obesity than common high-fat diets typically used in rodent studies.

The results suggest that researchers can get more accurate information from animal models that eat a diet that may resemble what humans consume. Use of the CAF model also may be useful for identifying novel options for preventative interventions or therapeutics to treat obesity in humans, the study noted.

Liza Makowski, Ph.D., assistant professor of nutrition at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and the study’s senior author said, “Obesity has reached epidemic levels in the United States and these findings provide us with a better animal model to help explore what factors are contributing most to this dangerous trend, and what strategies for prevention and treatment of obesity will be most successful.”

Although it can’t be pinpointed what component of these snacks is causing these pre-diabetes conditions, but it is shown that the ‘cafeteria diet’ provides a more severe animal model of metabolic syndrome than lard-based high-fat diets. Metabolic syndrome is the cluster of factors that increase a person’s risk for coronary artery disease, stroke and Type 2 diabetes.

The rapid gain in weight, extensive obesity and multi-organ dysfunctions observed in the CAF model more closely reflect what is happening to humans who eat these snack foods regularly.  The researchers noted that rats fed the tasty, highly palatable “cafeteria diet” ate more food – about 30 percent more calories – than those eating high-fat or high-sugar diets.