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

[wotw]

If there's a significant difference in life expectancy between your two mouse groups, how are you going to know whether it's due to the extra sugar or the extra calories?

Confounding factors

[drwex]

This is a good example of one of a set of confounding factors in such a study. There are lots of others, both physical and environmental. Isolating a simple causal connection between any dietary factor and lifespan is something that has eluded science for pretty much all of modern history.