As well as affecting the brain, alcohol can also irritate the gut and can affect nutrient intake and absorption (131). In fact, it can often be difficult to separate the nutritional effects that accompany alcohol consumption from the teratogenic effects of alcohol alone (131, 132), and some studies suggest that nutritional deficits exacerbate the effects of alcohol (133–135) or that supplementation during the period of alcohol exposure may limit damage (131, 136). Because of the large interplay between alcohol and nutrition, having appropriate nutrition controls that help to distinguish between the deficits due to diet and the deficits purely due to the teratogenicity of alcohol are important to consider when choosing a model. A “pair-fed” control is often utilized for this purpose in most rodent models of FASD. A pair-fed group acts as a calorie-matched control group, with each animal receiving the same amount of food in g/kg/day as its matched ethanol consuming pregnant dam. Normally, a carbohydrate substance (such as maltose dextrin or sucrose) is used to account for the ethanol-derived calories in the diet. Using a pair-fed group
