Inorganic Salts in Nutrition

One of the devices which can be used to throw light upon the organism's response to dietary restriction is the analysis of the entire body of suitably selected groups of experimental animals.Although this procedure largely fails in differentiating constituents of the body fluids from those in the tissues, it does supplement metabolic studies, tissue and blood analysis, and permits a broad view of the end-results of the efforts to maintain physiologic integrity in the organism.The present study describes the changes taking place in the composition of the entire bodies of albino rats restricted to a ration extremely poor in certain inorganic salts.EXPERIMENTAL Animals and Diets-The rats used, except for one group, were from the groups described in the preceding study ( 17).The group designated preexperimental controls comprised young rats of approximately the same age and body weight as the rats of the other three groups at the time they were placed on the experimental diets (38 days of age and 130 gm.body weight).They serve to show what changes have occurred in the three groups during the period of the experiment.In some instances the animals were the same as those from which some serum had been removed.Cor-* Part of the data forming the basis of this paper was taken from a dissertation submitted by Paul K.