Metabolomic Response of Feeding Functional Foods and Exercise on Obesity Risk in Rats
Obesity is one of the independent risk factors for serious health problems associated with many ailments and its incidence has increased in recent years as a major health problem worldwide. Obesity induces perturbation in metabolism which demand a corresponding shift in research more focus towards large scale unbiased analytical approaches ―metabolomics‖ by which we can monitor changes in metabolome. Therefore, metabolomics is used in this research to monitor the outcome of treatment with some functional foods and exercises, by observing whether the metabolic phenotypes of treated, diseased rats shifts in the cluster of healthy controls. Study had been carried out by inducing obesity in the rats through administration of high fat diet (HFD). Obese rats were subsequently treated with functional foods used for obesity management including grapefruit, pomegranate, red cabbage and/or swimming exercise. Histopathological studies and conventional biochemical biomarkers were measured in obese rats. In parallel, serum and urine samples were analyzed using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) followed by multivariate data analysis to classify samples and determine if such treatments can help revert obesity related metabolic changes back to normal status. Further and to pinpoint active agents in these functional food juices, ultra performance liquid chromatography coupled to high resolution TOF MS was used for profiling of secondary metabolites