Dietary fat and serum triglycerides

ABSTRACT

Fasting serum triglyceride levels from children in our ward who have recovered from malnutrition are about 30 percent of the values reported by others for normal children or similarly recovered patients. Our patients have been treated for malnutrition with a diet containing 60-70 percent of total calories as fat. We have investigated the effects of the dietary fat intake on the fasting level of serum triglycerides by feeding these children a diet containing 30 percent of the calories as fat. Two to 4 days after changing the diet, fasting serum triglycerides rose 200 to 700 percent; thereafter the values stabilized within the normal values usually found in the literature. The rise was accounted for mainly by the d<1.019 lipoprotein triglycerides. Advantage was taken of the wide range of values obtained to study the composition of the d<1.019 lipoprotein. The data obtained support the hypothesis that the components of this lipoprotein fraction are in a constant proportion, thus it would constitute a definite chemical entity. The high sensitivity of infants to changes in the dietary fat intake and the rapidity of this response are being considered in the studies concerning the pathogenic mechanism of the fatty infiltration of the liver produced by protein malnutrition (AU)