An awful lot of basic nutritional research is done using lab
rats, supplementing their diet with this or that nutrient and
monitoring results.  For example, I was searching medline for
research on coconut oil and found countless studies using lab
rats and chickens, but very few human studies.

It occurred to me that the "baseline" diet for lab rats is
someting like Purina Rat Chow: vitamin-enriched cereal pellets.
Same for chickens.  But wild rats eat bugs and carrion and stuff
like that, I believe; not cereal.  So the research is already
skewed by the fact that the rats are on a "civilized" diet, and
this seems not to be recognized as a confounding variable.


Todd Moody
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www.sju.edu/~tmoody/