Lipids and dietary

The preparation time for a PER is extensive and involves several days for acquisition of rats and their acclimation before a feeding trial begins. Preparation of a consistent and uniform diet is not trivial. Adequate diet for each treatment for the course of the study should be prepared shortly in advance of the study. Testing of the diet involves chemical analysis for protein (i.e., Kjeldahl N takes several hours) and accurate determination of other diet constituents (e.g., ash, crude lipid, and dietary fiber) so that isocaloric diets can be formulated between treatment groups. These determinations take >1 day to complete. It is recommended that multiple samples from each diet be obtained for proximate analysis of diet before it is fed to ensure that each diet has the proper nitrogen content (and this is same between diet treatments) and that all diets are isocaloric. 

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