Why Diet Studies in Mice Are Often Unreliable
Mice are commonly used in nutrition and disease research because they share most of their genes with us, and they are small and inexpensive. But the mice themselves have many subtle confounding factors that, if not taken into account and properly controlled, can really spoil experimental results.
A lot of criticism is that some researchers ignore (or fail to report ) how even the most subtle environmental factors can influence mouse biology and therefore experimental results. The point is, the experimental results from one study in mice cannot be replicated, and they don’t even work on other mice . Some reasons why:
- Factors such as lighting, air quality, food type and amount, environmental stress, water pH, or even where the researchers got their mice from can influence the results.
- Mice eat the feces of other mice. When looking at health or diet related results, it complicates things where you don’t know which mice ate, how much of their feces, and what they contained.
- Mice can have different metabolic responses to certain food choices, which in turn can alter their gut and affect dietary results.
If researchers do not pay close attention to these confounding variables, it makes even less sense to extrapolate any important findings from such nutrition and health studies to humans. As Dr. Yoni Friedhoff, an assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Ottawa, explains in a blog post, “We cannot draw conclusions about human nutritional outcomes based on mouse studies alone.”
Mouse Diet Studies Invalid For People Letting Mice Go | Important questions