Scoring Animal Nutrition Studies

Human studies on food intake, are quite limiting. Human subjects:

• Cannot be controlled or monitored 24 hours a day on their food intake.
• May cheat, intentionally or accidentally, snacking on non-diet foods.
• Prefer a diverse range of foods. They may stop participating in the study simply because they don't like eating the same food all day, every day.
• Expect a diet to be a short term experiment, not a long lifestyle change.

All of these factors make human studies provide poor quality data.

Instead, many studies are done on animals, especially rodents.
Rodents' diets can be controlled and monitored for their entire lifespan.

Although their digestive system may differ from humans', rodents have the ability to get cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and other forms of metabolic syndrome, allowing us to draw analogs of general causes of such diseases.


Unfortunately, almost all animal studies that I have reviewed, were flawed.

Any setup information that was not discussed in detail, is frequently poorly handled.
Researchers spend much more time examining and discussing the results of the study, rather than making sure their initial setup was well done.

Students are often pushed to write as many papers as possible, leading them to cut the experiments short.
Instead of studying the long term mortality effects of a particular diet, researchers frequently stop the experiment and draw conclusions from data that was as little as 3 weeks long.

As a result, many articles end up being a big waste of grant money, and provide much confusion for the scientific community.
Although animal food intake research has been going on for centuries, with the ongoing conflicts in observations, very few substantial conclusions have been made.


Initially I wanted to write up a post, what would be a "gold standard" article. A study that would be able to overcome the usual conflicting arguments involved in research, and really make a difference in science.
But then I realized I can do something even better..
Inspired by Cornucopia's Egg Scorecard, I decided to dedicate my time to "grading" animal food intake research articles.
I will taking into account factors like: the nutritional intake being similar between the different experimental diets, the length of the experiment, and conflicts of interest from funding bias.

The hope is that over time, if someone emails you a study, you'd be able to look it up on my scorecard, and be able to quickly judge the value of that article.

The permanent link to the list of articles is here:
https://veniaminilmer.blogspot.com/p/animal-studies.html

I am looking for high quality studies to add to the list.
Have a link to a good study? Please send it my way.
Just make sure the article is a free publicly available paper, that involves animal food intake, experimenting with different diets.