Introduction — Laboratory Diets

Abstract

It has been assumed frequently that diet is a passive entity in so far as both the testing of drugs and their use in practice are concerned. There has been insufficient recognition that diet forms part of the model when laboratory animals are used in the development of drugs. Scant attention has been paid to diet in texts on laboratory animals. Even as recently as 1984, a standard text on animal models simply recommends for rats “a standard commercial rodent diet, usually in the form of firm dry blocks or pellets, without any type of supplemental feeding”. The same diet is recommended for gerbils, which may be supplemented with limited amounts of green food such as lettuce, spinach, or carrots. The author commented simply that sunflower seeds are not satisfactory as a total diet because they are low in calcium and high in fat content. There is thus an enduring assumption that diet has no impact on the modelling process. That diet may act as a vehicle of disease; that many forms are unscientific by not being reproducible; and that diet is frequently far removed from that consumed by the species being mimicked, are facts too often ignored. An objective of this review is to demonstrate that diet is able to play an active role both in the development of drugs and in their clinical application.