Abstract

Abnormal or disturbed nutrition levels cannot be experimentally tested in humans to determine the consequences of varied maternal nutrition on fetal and neonatal or later outcomes. The role of undernutrition or disturbed nutrition in humans must therefore be limited to such testing as can be done under wellcontrolled conditions in nonhuman primates (NHPs). The similarities of the gastrointestinal and the endocrine/metabolic systems between humans and NHPs ensure that the results of such studies performed in NHPs are highly relevant to human nutrition. Such key comparisons of similarities between human and NHPs include the determinations that many key molecules are effectively identical across these primate species, including for example, the insulin molecule (identical) and C-peptide (single amino acid substitution), and many other features that allow especially high translational potential for results obtained in NHPs.

Keywords: Nutrition, nonhuman primates, NHPs

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