Nutrition, nutritional diseases, and nutrition research applications

Publisher Summary Guinea pig has been used extensively as an animal model because of its size, intermediate between a rat and a rabbit, its tractable nature, and some biochemical and metabolic characteristics that make it useful for nutrition research. The guinea pig has a great potential as a research animal, and as it becomes more widely used, it is essential to understand its nutritional requirements and the interactions among nutrients that may affect its experimental response. This chapter reviews the literature describing the nutrition of the guinea pig. It presents and classifies those areas where little or no information is available on specific nutritional requirements of the guinea pig. The chapter also describes the nutritional diseases in the guinea pig and other diseases probably related to the nutritional status. There are certain characteristics of guinea pig which limits its use in certain areas of research: (1) the long fetal life of the guinea pig is responsible for its high degree of development at birth and makes it less useful than the rat for postnatal growth and development studies, (2) the gram-positive flora of the intestine is easily altered by antibiotics and studies involving systemic antibacterial compounds are not usually successful.