Special Diets

AIN Diets

In the 1970s, the situation prompted the formation of a committee of the American Institute for Nutrition (AIN), the predecessor to the current ASN, which led to the first widely accepted, open-source formula diet for rats and mice, published in 1977 in The Journal of Nutrition. 

High Fat Diets

A normal rodent diet contains about 10% fat, so both 45 and 60% fat diets are high-fat for rodents. Mice on the 45% fat diet become obese. However, mice on the 60% fat diet become more obese, and do so more rapidly.

Control Diets

Researchers will often use a low fat grain-based (GB) diet containing unrefined ingredients as the control diet. Such a comparison between two completely different diet types makes it impossible to draw conclusions regarding the phenotypic differences driven by diet. While many compositional differences can account for this, one major difference that could have the greatest impact between GB and purified diets is the fiber content, both in terms of the level and composition.