Testing Wheat on Mice

Most consumers would agree there has to be more to eating healthy than just increasing a products fiber or whole grain ratio. It also has to taste good. If a food product doesn't taste good, it won't matter how healthy it proves to be, people won't buy it. Up steps, or scampers as the case happens to be, some very pampered mice. Wheat researchers have been using mice to try and pin point the best tasting wheat varieties. In lab tests designed to identify what one researcher calls the "yummy and yucky" genes in wheat the mice preferred wheat kernels over their lab food pellets, and soft wheat over hard wheat. If you're wondering like I did why they didn't just use a people panel to determine which wheat was tastier, the answer is fairly simple, the mice are more affordable in the beginning stages of testing. If the mice appear to have a noticeable flavor and texture preference for one wheat over another, a trained sensory panel of the two legged variety can then be employed to see if they detect a noticeable difference. For some very lucky mice the next step in this process involves testing over two hundred varieties of wheat. I wonder if a mouse belch is as audible as spiders wearing tennis shoes?