Planned Homemade Mix - feedback?

[Jazzable]

I'm in the process of theoretically planning a homemade mix for my gerbils. It's pretty likely I won't end up being able to actually make/use it, but I just like planning it anyway. I used the nutrition calculator and so far the fat and protein percentages are just right. But some of the ingredients I added in manually so they didn't have all the vitamins and minerals amounts. How do I tell whether the food I'm giving will have all the trace nutrients that they need? If I feed a homemade mix, should I use vitamin drops in their water to make sure? One of the components of my mix is a pre-made pellet food, will that contain everything they need?

Here is my planned mix, anyway. Feedback welcome:
- 2 parts Rolled Oats
- 2 parts millet (straight from the spray)
- 4 parts Beaphar Care+ pellets
- 2 parts white pasta
- 3 parts white rice
- 1 part sunflower seeds
Protein: 13%, fat: 7%.

My gerbs have tried (and liked!) every ingredient, so I'm pretty sure it will go down well, assuming it's healthy for them. 

[rhianna]

The recipe looks really good. You won't need any additional source of vitamins/nutrients as the pellets contain all that is necessary. I know that gerbils generally don't like hay pellets- they're the long greenish tubular pellets that are in most food mixes. Maybe you could substitute them with regular timothy hay? Gerbils seem to love timothy hay.

[Jazzable]

rhianna thanks for the reply. I might substitute the hay pellets with a low-sugar cereal - maybe shredded wheat or something similar. And give them fresh hay instead. The hay pellets reduced the protein, so with them substituted for shredded wheats, it comes to 13.4% (according to the spreadsheet calculator from this forum). That's marked as high, but it's still much lower than most commercial mixes, so I'm pretty sure it would be OK. The fat is 6.7% which is just right.

And the amount of nutrients in the pellets would be enough, even when the pellets are only a small portion of the diet?

I sort of want to think of something else to use instead of shredded wheat, though. Seeing as the pasta is already wheat, I'd hope to have every ingredient have a bit of variety and be different types of grain/seed. But most breakfast cereals are either some mixture of wheat, oats, or rice which I already have. Any other suggestions about something fairly easy to obtain (and preferably cheap!) which isn't based on any of the grains I've already used? I know it's fine to use more wheat, but I'd be pleased if I could have each ingredient different.

Actually just removing the shredded wheats completely leaves it at 13.5% and 7.5% which is still pretty much OK, just slightly high on the fat. Hmm...

[Jazzable]

I could add some dried corn (maize) - that has low-ish values for protein and fat and would reduce the overall. But I've heard it's not too healthy and something of a filler, so maybe not ideal when I'm trying to make a healthy homemade mix. :/

[rhianna]

Maybe a soy-based cereal? Though that would probably raise the protein percentage. Maybe you could remove the timothy pellets and then remove all or some sunflower seeds to lower the fat? You're right about corn, it's unhealthy and usually just a filler. A lot of gerbils don't even like it.

[Jazzable]

Can't seem to find anything soy-based that isn't specifically geared towards having loads of protein. I think I'll just remove the hay pellets and leave the rest, because the % are decent enough. I just checked and if I doubled the rice to 4 parts, it would reduce the fat to 6.6. But that would be quite a bit of rice. The gerbs do seem to like it but still, not sure if it might be bad to have that much... Maybe I'll just leave it as is without the hay pellets. After all, e-gerbil recommends 6-8% fat, so 7.5% is still fine.

[Jazzable]

OK, I'm thinking I up the rice to 3 parts. That leaves the final mix as:
- 2 parts Rolled Oats
- 2 parts millet (straight from the spray)
- 4 parts Beaphar Care+ pellets
- 2 parts white pasta
- 3 parts white rice
- 1 part sunflower seeds
And the final percentages are 13% protein and 7% fat, just about right for both.

[johanne]

I would rethink the white rice. I had a bunch of gerbils die on a diet similar to that, with lots of rice. Try your local health food or natural foods store. You might be able to find things like barley, rye, triticale, spelt, kamut in a variety of forms including grains, flakes and even puffed. Our gerbils love puffed cereals.

[Jazzable]

Nov 21, 2013 16:35:17 GMT -8 johanne said:

I would rethink the white rice. I had a bunch of gerbils die on a diet similar to that, with lots of rice. Try your local health food or natural foods store. You might be able to find things like barley, rye, triticale, spelt, kamut in a variety of forms including grains, flakes and even puffed. Our gerbils love puffed cereals.

Really? You think it was because of the rice?

I may swap it for puffed rice cereal instead, if the sugar is low enough.

[rhianna]

I agree with johanne, so much rice is probably not the best. It would be a better option to add other grains instead and either stick with a lower amount of rice or no rice at all. Even if you don't have a health food shop most grocery stores have at least a small section dedicated to health/organic foods.

[johanne]

Nov 21, 2013 16:44:18 GMT -8 Jazzable said:

Really? You think it was because of the rice?

I may swap it for puffed rice cereal instead, if the sugar is low enough.

I didn't spend a lot of time analysing the diet given that feeding it caused death... Certainly the gerbils wouldn't eat rice in larger amounts, at least not for long. I think part of the problem with the diet was the cal/phos ratio. Watch those calcium and phosphorus numbers. It's easy to get the phosphorus too high relative to calcium and that's going to cause problems.

If you're missing some of the nutrient information for some of your ingredients, you can often find it online. You can search for items at Self Nutrition Data; you can choose the 100 gram quantity for each item to get percentages.

[Jazzable]

Nov 21, 2013 19:02:11 GMT -8 johanne said:

Nov 21, 2013 16:44:18 GMT -8 Jazzable said:

Really? You think it was because of the rice?

I may swap it for puffed rice cereal instead, if the sugar is low enough.

I didn't spend a lot of time analysing the diet given that feeding it caused death... Certainly the gerbils wouldn't eat rice in larger amounts, at least not for long. I think part of the problem with the diet was the cal/phos ratio. Watch those calcium and phosphorus numbers. It's easy to get the phosphorus too high relative to calcium and that's going to cause problems.

If you're missing some of the nutrient information for some of your ingredients, you can often find it online. You can search for items at Self Nutrition Data; you can choose the 100 gram quantity for each item to get percentages.

How do you know it was the diet that harmed the gerbils?

[Jazzable]

Do you think using puffed rice instead would be OK?

[Jazzable]

OK, I've been tweaking. I've changed quite a few things. Latest plan is equal parts of all the following:
- Rolled oats
- Millet (from the spray)
- Beaphar Care+
- White pasta
- Puffed brown rice
- Whole Rye
- Plus half that amount of sunflower seeds.
Protein: 12.6%, Fat: 7.3%.
Thoughts?

[johanne]

Nov 22, 2013 5:29:11 GMT -8 Jazzable said:

How do you know it was the diet that harmed the gerbils?

Well, we had 13 gerbils suddenly drop dead in a short span of time, where we typically lose 3 or 4 elderly gerbils per month. Some were young, one only 13 months, otherwise healthy gerbils. We do necropsies on most of our deceased gerbils; cause of death of the younger ones was starvation and dehydration... in all cases there was food and water available. Sometimes it was one gerbil in a bin, sometimes both. We normally feed our gerbils quite generously, and they can get a bit chubby as a result. With the new diet they seemed generally to lose weight, though it didn't concern me at first as I thought they could lose a bit anyway. The diet had been approved by animal nutrition specialists so I didn't watch as closely as I would have otherwise.

Some of the gerbils were older and had other issues at necropsy as well, but heart disease was common among them (usually a rare cause of death). As soon as we changed the diet after this the deaths stopped, except for a couple older ones that died a few days later of heart failure. I guess it was too late to save them. There are studies that show calcium excess can contribute to heart disease (eg Calcium Supplements Lead to Heart Disease). If you do a bit of research you'll find that absolute amounts of calcium and phosphorus are less important than the ratio between them, and the symptoms are the same whether too much or too little calcium is consumed. There were also 2 gerbils that I found near death, already cold, that I was able to resuscitate with heat and food/water by syringe.

Given the necropsy results and pattern of deaths, I'm confident diet was the problem. Nothing else had changed and the deceased gerbils were in different locations. Our gerbils are normally very healthy; I take considerable pride in seeing that they have nice shiny, healthy looking coats.