Hi! I'm currently having issues with my experiment.
I made high-fat diet consisting of rat chow diet, corn (maize) oil, ghee butter, milk powder, and refined brown sugar powder. Apparently, the samples didn't fancy the food and nearly ate nothing from it.
I was thinking if using food pipes will help, but if that so I fear the rodents get infected before the experiment finishes.
Can anyone help on how to make rodents eat the diet voraciously? and is there any research on food pipe's risk factor on infection?
Thank you
I would be worried about the stress possibly caused by the food pipes on the outcome of the experiment.
You might an inert binder to the diet to make it more palatable.
Thank you for the answer. Do you know where to get the inert binder? And, is it possible that the Wistar rats didn't like the food because it contains margarine?
You might use ordinary sand (like we used in our sand study, see attachment) or a more specially treated or selected Silicium oxide (like we used in our old toxicity study, see also attachment).
A disadvantage of these carriers/adsorbents might be that they absorb so strongly ,that some of the nutrients in the diet will not be available to the animal and will end up in the faeces (like in our toxicity study), so be careful in your choices. Suppliers of chemicals will be a good source of these type of materials.
If have no knowledge of the sensitivity of rats for off-flavours, but I can imagine that rancidity due to some of the fats used, might have an effect on feed intake.
Be aware that your diet is quite likely very rich in energy, so the animals might not need a lot of it to satisfy their daily energy need.
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