Custom Research Diets...the basics

• Purified diets use refined ingredients such as casein, sucrose, corn starch, fat, oil, and cellulose.  These food grade ingredients have relatively simple chemical compositions (predominantly one nutrient classification), and this feature is important for manipulating individual nutrients for research objectives.  Selected refined ingredients provide uniformity and reproducibility benefits, and also help reduce natural substances which may have biological activity.
  
  
• Natural ingredient diets contain the types of feedstuffs commonly associated with standard diets for laboratory animals.  Ingredients such as corn, wheat, soybean meal, alfalfa meal, fish meal, and other by-products have relatively complex and variable chemical compositions.  However, selected ingredients of this nature sometimes can be used for a custom research diet.  See NaCl Adjusted Series for a rodent diet example. Research diets for certain species (rabbits, guinea pigs, swine, primates) may utilize some of these kinds of ingredients for various reasons.
  
  
• Hybrid diets contain a mixture of natural and refined ingredients.  This approach might be necessary to limit specific nutrients or non-nutrient substances.  The inclusion of some natural ingredients can enhance palatability of the diet, particularly for rabbits and guinea pigs.
  
  
• Standard diets can serve as the base to add various types of in-house ingredients.  This could be an ingredient such as cholesterol, lithium, doxycycline, Uniprim, vitamin E, etc.  You can choose from a variety of different standard rodent diets as the base diet.
  
  
• Customer supplied ingredients can be added at a prescribed amount to a purified, natural ingredient, hybrid, or standard diet.   We add a wide variety of test compounds, food components, prescription medications, herbs, and much more, to a variety of base diets.  See customer supplied ingredients to learn more about this process.