ABSTRACT
Scientific research is continuously generating new ingredients for food and pharmaceu-
tical products. In pace with consumer awareness of healthy products, considerable efforts
are made to find new ingredients with beneficial effects on human health. The health
benefits of such ingredients need to be assessed in human trials prior to being developed as
a product for wider human consumption. Animal trials, conducted prior to human trials,
offer a sound filtering system that provide the opportunity to identify those ingredients that
are worthy of the relatively costly human studies that may follow. Animal models are
important tools used in the study of human gastrointestinal (GI) microbiology.
Specifically, animal models are used when considering the effect of food and
pharmaceutical ingredients on GI health and disease. These effects include the metabolic
and immunological activities of microorganisms that colonize the human gastrointestinal
tract (GIT).
