Improving Animal Diets to Increase Relevance to Human Populations

Background: Rodent models have been an invaluable resource for biomedical research and have been instrumental for countless advances in our understanding of biology and human disease.  However, inherent to using these models is the issue of translatability of research findings to human populations. Some differences between humans and rodents can never be reconciled because of key differences in physiology.  However, rodent models have evolved over time through innovations in genetics and standardized animal diets, resulting in reduced variability across experiments. Developing animal diets that more closely emulate what humans eat will help increase the translational fidelity of animal models to human populations. This review will focus on the role of basal laboratory diets for improving animal models. Keywords: laboratory rodent diets, total Western Diet, allometric scaling, nutrient density scaling