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Annual Review of Animal Biosciences

Volume 13, 2025

The Rhesus Macaque as an Animal Model for Human Nutrition: An Ecological-Evolutionary Perspective

  • Zhenwei Cui1,2, Yunlong Dong1,2, Jonathan Sholl3, Jiqi Lu2 and David Raubenheimer1,4
  • 1Centre for Nutritional Ecology, Centre for Sport Nutrition and Health, School of Physical Education (Main Campus), Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, Henan, China 2Institute of Biodiversity and Ecology, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, Henan, China 3ImmunoConcept Lab, Université de Bordeaux, Collège Sciences de la Santé, CNRS UMR 5164, Bordeaux, France 4Charles Perkins Centre, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia; email: [email protected]
  • Vol. 13:441-464 (Volume publication date February 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on November 18, 2024
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

Nutrition is a complex and contested area in biomedicine, which requires diverse evidence sources. Nonhuman primate models are considered an important biomedical research tool because of their biological similarities to humans, but they are typically used with little explicit consideration of their ecology and evolution. Using the rhesus macaque (RM), we consider the potential of nutritional ecology for enriching the use of primates as models for human nutrition. We introduce some relevant aspects of RM evolutionary and social ecology and discuss two examples where they have been used in biomedical research: obesity and aging. We next consider how insights from nutritional ecology can help inform and direct the use of RM as a biomedical model. We conclude by illustrating how conceptual tools might inform the use of RM as a model for human nutrition and extracting insights from RM that might be relevant to broader theoretical considerations around animal model systems.

Keyword(s): animal model systems, caloric restriction, niche models, nutritional ecology, nutritional geometry, obesity research
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/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-animal-111523-102354
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The Rhesus Macaque as an Animal Model for Human Nutrition: An Ecological-Evolutionary Perspective
Annual Review of Animal Biosciences 13, 441 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-animal-111523-102354
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-animal-111523-102354
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-animal-111523-102354
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