With purified diets, your materials and methods are easy to report, repeat, and modify. Your research benefits from constant formulas, with precise batch-to-batch consistency, whenever and wherever your research is repeated. When you want to vary your experiment, modifications are easy to formulate. When we design custom purified diet formulas for your particular research needs, you maintain complete control of the nutrient composition and can study the effects of variations of specific nutritional components. See Modifications to Purified Diets.
The fundamental purposes of a purified diet are
Global Standard. When your research requires a precise, repeatable, identifiable background diet, purified ingredient diets are the perfect solution. You or colleagues anywhere in the world can consistently repeat, easily modify, and accurately report your research with confidence. Purified diets provide a dependable base for your research, with unmitigated consistency from batch-to-batch, whether a month, year, or decade later.
Research-Based Nutrition. The nutritional sufficiency of purified ingredient diets has been established by decades of research by tens of thousands of researchers.
The “AIN” series were published by the American Institute of Nutrition (now the American Society for Nutritional Sciences –ASNS), based on extensive research and a broad collaboration of researchers.
Purina TestDiet® # 58B0 (a/k/a # 5800-B) – AIN-76A Diet (replacement for AIN-76)
Purina TestDiet® # 57W5 (a/k/a # 5801-G – AIN-93G Diet for gestation, lactation, and growth
Purina TestDiet® # 58M1 (a/k/a # 5801-M – AIN-93M Diet for maintenance of mature animals
We have an innovative new series of diets — The TestDiet® 21st Century Western Diet Series™— based on AIN-93G and resulting from an in-depth study of dietary fat inducing symptoms of metabolic syndrome.
We’ve tested our world-renowned purified-ingredient TestDiet® 5755 Basal Diet against natural-ingredient mouse and rat feeds, with excellent results:
See: Comparative Research Data – Rats
Comparative Research Data – Mice
Open Formulas/Open Source. While the specific nutrients of our natural ingredient grain-based animal feeds (i.e., LabDiet®) may vary very slightly from batch to batch as we achieve nutritional consistency under Constant Nutrition®, our precise purified ingredient diets are always produced according to a unique open formula. Precise open formulas specify the exact description and amount of each ingredient, including all minerals and vitamins; they have an “open source code”. Some vitamin and mineral mix formulas are available on this web site; we will provide you with any purified diet vitamin or mineral mix on request. Contact us.
Pure Ingredients. In purified ingredient diets, each nutrient is derived from a distinct refined ingredient. Ingredients are obtained from reliable, consistent, traceable suppliers of human-grade food products. You always know not only the exact nutritional content, but also the specific ingredients – no more and no less. Purified diets contain no phytoestrogens and no significant bacterial contamination. In fact, purified diets typically contain as much as 100 times less naturally-occurring bacteria as standard grain-based diets. Therefore, you can be confident that your resulting data is accurate—unadulterated by unknown and varying components of grain-based animal feed. “Purified” should mean all ingredients, including casein.
Whoever manufactures your purified diets should assure you that they are using pure ingredients of known, verifiable, consistent composition to the greatest extent practicable.
For example, a number of purified diet manufacturers might use in their diets a less-expensive milk casein that is not vitamin-free; consequently, unknown and random amounts of various vitamins are introduced into each batch of diet without being recognized or reported.
The protein content of this less expensive casein can also fluctuate significantly. This cost-cutting practice defeats the fundamental purposes of a purified diet—full knowledge of all ingredients, complete open formulas, and repeatable consistency, resulting in accurate, reliable data.
Consistent with the value of your research, Purina TestDiet® uses only the more expensive, more precise vitamin-free milk casein in our purified diets; and, we routinely assay our casein to confirm that the protein content is within tight tolerances.
Quality. When consistent diets go into your research, precise results come out.™
Purified diets are a major investment in the quality and reliability of your research. Typically, post-manufacturing analysis is not conducted on purified diets, but product integrity depends upon the quality and consistency of the ingredients and the integrity of the manufacturing process.
We operate the cleanest, most efficient, most precise purified diet production laboratory in the world. Our facilities are GLP & GMP compatible, and ISO-9001:2000 certified. Because of these certifications, our depth of expertise in lab animal nutrition, our scrupulous attention to detail and precision, and our commitment to using the finest ingredients regardless of cost, you never need to conduct post-production analysis for a TestDiet® product. You should hold whoever produces your custom diets to these same exacting standards.
For a discussion of certain advantages of purified diets over grain-based diets, see excerpt from Lichtman, A.H., Clinton, S.K., Iiyama, K., Connelly, P.W., Libby, P., Cybulsky, M.I. Hyperlipidemia and Atherosclerotic Lesion Development in LDL Receptor Deficient Mice Fed Defined Semipurified Diets With and Without Cholate. Arterioscler Thromb Vasc Biol. 1999;19:1938-1944.
See also:
If we've used purified diets from another manufacturer, why should we switch to TestDiet®?
What about "high-fat" purified diets?
What forms of diets are available?