A simple action reduces high fat diet intake and obesity in mice

Diets that are high in fat cause over-eating and weight gain in multiple species of animals, suggesting that high dietary fat is sufficient to cause obesity. However, high-fat diets are typically provided freely to animals in obesity experiments, so it remains unclear if high-fat diets would still cause obesity if they required more effort to obtain. We hypothesized that unrestricted and easy access is necessary for high-fat diet induced over-eating, and the corollary that requiring mice to perform small amounts of work to obtain high-fat diet would reduce high-fat diet intake and associated weight gain. To test this hypothesis, we developed a novel home-cage based feeding device that either provided high-fat diet freely, or after mice poked their noses into a port one time - a simple action that is easy for them to do. We tested the effect of this intervention for six weeks, with mice receiving all daily calories from high-fat diet, modifying only how they accessed it. Requiring mice to nose-poke to access high-fat diet reduced intake and nearly completely prevented the development of obesity. In follow up experiments, we observed a similar phenomenon in mice responding for low-fat grain-based pellets that do not induce obesity, suggesting a general mechanism whereby animals engage with and consume more food when it is freely available vs. when it requires a simple action to obtain. We conclude that unrestricted access to food promotes overeating, and that a simple action such as a nose-poke can reduce over-eating and weight gain in mice. This may have implications for why over-eating and obesity are common in modern food environments, which are often characterized by easy access to low-cost unhealthy foods.