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Updated: Aug 13, 2026

Palatable Western-style Cafeteria Diet as a Reliable Method for Modeling Diet-induced Obesity in Rodents
Published on: November 1, 2019
A bedside-to-outside model of human nutrition research
Aaron Hengist1, Stephanie T Chung1, Valerie L Darcey1
1Diabetes, Endocrinology, & Obesity Branch, NIDDK, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA.
None:
One of the fundamental challenges with human nutrition research is the difficulty of knowing what people actually eat. Asking people to live in the laboratory enables precise control and measurement of food intake, but the environment does not reflect real-world conditions. Here, we present a bedside-to-outside model, which aims to address this gap by combining controlled feeding studies (prioritizing efficacy) with free-living intervention studies (incorporating effectiveness) within the same cohort. This approach will enable translation of the efficacy and effectiveness of dietary interventions with causal inference within the same cohort, offering novel insights into the real-world impact of controlled dietary interventions.

