Tupaia belangeri (Wagner, 1841), a Northern Treeshrew is an Animal Model of Metabolic Healthy Obesity

ABSTRACT Obesity has become a harmful factor for life expectancy through a series of diseases, but research on obesity in the past few decades has obtained only limited results. The discovery of the metabolic healthy obesity phenomenon brings a new direction for research of obesity problem, but the lack of an animal of metabolic healthy obesity limits its study. Tupaia belangeri is a new type of experimental animal emerging in recent years and is extremely widely used in various disease models because of its evolutionary status and high affinity with primates. Here, in order to judge whether this new experimental animal can serve as special materials in obesity research, we constructed an obesity model in T. belangeri by using high-fat food, then studied animal insulin sensitivity, blood pressure, blood biochemistry, routine blood, inflammatory response, and liver fat accumulation, etc. We found that T. belangeri had no metabolic disorders such as insulin resistance, hypertension, or hyperlipidemia after obesity, and there were also no typical obesity complications such as diabetes, inflammation, or fatty liver. To sum up, we suggest that T. belangeri can be used as an animal model of metabolic healthy obesity, and the special model organism of metabolic healthy obesity will provide us with new opportunities to study obesity problems.