I'm thinking about doing some animal testing.

[darxus]

On the hypotheses "Availability of refined sugars reduces life span.", using mice.

Any suggestions on how to make this more scientifically valuable?

Get some female mice, split them up into two cages, feed one an unlimited amount of typical healthy mouse food, and feed the other the same, plus unlimited food with extra sugar. And see how long they all take to die. Typical life span is about 1 year.

Josh is trying to convince me I need to record quantity of sugar consumed.

How many mice? Josh also recommends Hsd:ICR mice. I'm tempted to just use much cheaper pet shop mice.

Update: I think providing water with sugar in it would work better than food with sugar.

Comments

[frobzwiththingz.livejournal.com]

i'm with milktree here. What are you going to really find out here? Even if you *do* manage to set up a decent design, collect your data for a year, run your numbers and by some miracle actually end up with a statistically significant result, so what?

How does this affect what you *really* want to know, which basically comes down to "If darxus cuts down on his sugar intake, will he feel better?" If you're going to spend huge chunks of your time designing and running an experiment, for petes sake, design and run *that one*.

[darxus.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty optimistic about me staying off sugar.

My goals were more along the lines of a surgeon general's warning on all products containing refined carbs.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

Then your first step is to get a grant for the study from either a major university or the NIH, otherwise no one is going to bother publishing it (which is the first step to getting anyone to pay attention). Or you can convince someone who is already in academia to do the study and put it through the appropriate hoops. Other than that it's pretty much guaranteed to not get anywhere near the Surgeon General. Even if it ever does it'll have to get past the food lobby to result in new recommendations, which is an uphill battle against machine guns when all you have is a knife. Overall it's not impossible, it's just rather unlikely.

There's always the option of getting a Ph.D. in biology. . .