The researchers found that the high-fat diet induced hyperalgesic priming — a neurological change that represents the transition from acute to chronic pain — and allodynia, which is pain resulting from stimuli that do not normally provoke pain. “It became clear, surprisingly, that you don’t need an underlying pathology or obesity. You just needed the diet,” Burton said. “This study indicates you don’t need obesity to trigger pain; you don’t need diabetes; you don’t need a pathology or injury at all. “We hypothesized that there had to be other precipitating factors.”Burton and his team looked for saturated fatty acids in the blood of the mice fed the high-fat diet.