Elisabetta Lauretti1, Luigi Iuliano2, Domenico Praticò1. 1. Department of Pharmacology and Center for Translational Medicine Lewis Katz School of Medicine Temple University Philadelphia Pennsylvania 19140. 2. Department of Medical Sciences and Biotechnology Sapienza University of Roma Latina 04100 Italy.
We thank Dr. Roede for his correspondence regarding our paper.1 The diet used in our study was the PicoLab® Rodent Diet 20 from Labdiet (St. Louis, MO), which contains 20% protein and is the standard rodent chow diet used in our animal facility. In this diet, the calories provided by protein are 24.5%, by fat are 13.1%, and by carbohydrates are 62.3%.2 The enriched diet was obtained by adding the Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO) (50 mg/kg diet) to the same standard diet. During the study we did not measure the food consumption of the animals, and we did not observe any significant difference in total body weight between the two groups of mice throughout the study. The EVOO used in our study was from the Apulia region of Italy and its chemical analysis revealed the following: total polyphenols (253 mg/kg), α‐tocopherol (381 mg/kg), γ‐tocopherol (23 mg/kg). Additionally, fatty acid analysis was performed by gas chromatography as described previously,3 and the results are shown in Table 1.