Peter just wrote about this on his Hyperlipid blog:
Low carbohydrate, high protein and ApoE-/- mice One offspring from the impatience of cardiologists is the apoE-/- mouse. This mouse is a genetic cripple who's ability to process fat has been severely damaged. There are a very, very, very small number of people in the world who are homozygous for defective apoE. They are functionally apoE-/-. Nature does not allow this commonly. Contrast it with FH [Familial Hypercholesterolemia] where there are hundreds of different types of FH, ie breaking your LDL receptor gene is easily done and evolution has not attempted to conserve it particularly highly.
Feeding a high fat diet to apoE-/- mice is bad news for the mice. Until anyone gives us the full text of the paper we'll have no idea of exactly what they fed to the mice but, ultimately, they broke the mice first. Actually, if Dr Murray is anything to go by, even the full text won't tell us much about what they fed the mice!
If you are apoE -/- I wish you luck. Statistically, you're not. Neither is the cardiologist, Dr Rosenzweig, who gave up his LC diet on the basis of this study. But then, he thinks the transgenic apoE-/- mouse is a model for human arteriosclerosis.
One of the blog commentators
wrote a hilarious letter responding to the lead researcher, Anthony Rosenzweig's "findings."