Effect of Vitamin A Deficiency on Fat Accumulation and Metabolism in Rats

Abstract

Recently, farmers are likely to feed low vitamin A diets to beef cattle in Japan, because of the improvement of carcass quality. However, the relationship between vitamin A status and fat accumulation in animal is unknown. The study was conducted to elucidate the effect of vitamin A deciciency on growth and fat accumulation in rats.

109 female rats of Wistar strain (4 weeks of age) were utilized in this study. The influence of initiation stage and period of vitamin A decicient diet feeding was investigated on animal growth and fat deposition in two experiments. The results obtained were as follows.

(1) When rats were fed vitamin A deficient diet during 20 weeks after the feeding of vitamin A adequate diet up to 10 weeks of age, vitamin A content of liver decreased from 20~44μg/g to less than 1μg/g.

(2) Growth response of rats given vitamin A deficient diet, however, was not different from control.

( 3) When rats were further fed vitamin A deficient diet for 20 weeks, serum vitamin A levels decreased from 15~22μg/100ml to less than 3μg/100ml.

( 4) During the 20 weeks, i.e. from 30 to 50 weeks of age, body weight and various organ weights per body weight did not gain in vitamin A deficient rats, resulting in the reduction of visceral and abdominal fat weights as compared with those of control. On the other hand, fat content in longissimus dorsi was not different between vitamin A deficient group and control group.