Animal models in the evaluation of inflammation caused by carbohydrate-rich diets: brief scientific literature review

The quality of diet influences in development of chronic diseases as obesity and metabolic syndrome that trigger low-grade inflammatory process. With the objective of analyzing the reflexes of obesity and metabolic inflammation animal models of diseases have been proposed to induce inflammatory processes through different types of diets, such as high-carbohydrate (HCD) and high-fat diets (HFD), both of them producing deleterious effects on the body. Studies show that the model of obesity induced by diets with high energy density, specifically HCD, is a relevant model for inflammatory processes linked to obesity. This study proposes to do an integrative review on dietary obesity and inflammatory animal models, especially using HCD within the last ten years, using the description words obesity, animal model and inflammation. 1,126 papers were published on these characteristics, with publication peaking in 2015. HCD diets were related to inflammation, important deleterious effects to the metabolism, generating systemic and tissue damages mainly at adipose, cardiac and hepatic levels, higher expression of proinflammatory cytokines along with greater visceral adiposity.