Indeed, the 8-week HFD rabbits showed several factors indicating an already developing metabolic syndrome process with, crucially, strong liver immunopositivity for inflammation, galectin-3 and vimentin, a marker for stellate cells (Puche et al., 2013) and activated macrophages (Mor-Vaknin et al., 2003), even though with limited involvement of biochemical hepatic markers. Here, VIM is linked to metabolic syndrome.