Natural diet

[gondigo]

I am in the process of designing my own version of degu diet after discovering symdromes possibly relating to micronutrient deficiency after feeding commercial food for a long time. And my first reference is this post . 

Unfortunately, there are a lot of herbs listed don't grow in my country and difficult/unbelievably expensive to purchase so I need to find local replacements.

We have a specialized discipline locally to research herbs effect on health and in these reseaches people use rodents of different sorts (TCM). Although such discipline is controversal internationally,  not all researches are that horrible, many researches are well equipped with modern medicine research practices, like identifying active chemical ingredients and design rigorous experiments. Therefore I see such replacements could be reasonably sound. 

During the research, I see some elegant designs from TCM perspective from the post. Now I am not satisified with the diet only providing enough nutrition, but also I would like it to boost immunity and take preventive measures on dental disease, diebetes and other common degu diseases [1].

The first is to replace amaranth with Portulaca oleracea L. polysaccharides [2]. 

I will start a thread here to record my progress for anyone who either faces the same dilemma in East/Southeast Asia or interested to use TCM to. 

[1] Jekl, V., Hauptman, K., & Knotek, Z. (2011). Diseases in pet degus: a retrospective study in 300 animals. Journal of Small Animal Practice, 52(2), 107–112. doi:10.1111/j.1748-5827.2010.01028.x
[2] WANG Chengxiang, LIU Yuxia, CHANG Shaohong, XING Erqing, XIE Suiliang. Effect and mechanism of action of Portulaca oleracea L. polysaccharides on glycolipid metabolism and renal function in juvenile diabetic rats[J].Journal of China Medical University, 2021, 50(1): 46-50,56.

[moletteuk]

What country are you in? How many degus do you have and what have you been feeding them?

Natural diets are much more common in Germany, although some people on this forum feed natural or semi natural diets.

There is quite a bit of information out there that should help you. If you work through our sticky threads in the feeding section there is a lot of information there. You might also find Degupedia useful www.degupedia.de/wiki/index.php?title=Hauptseite and forum.degus-international-community.org/index.php

One very important thing to consider when feeding a natural diet is how you will provide vitamin d as degus living indoors cannot make their own due to inadequate sunlight so they need either an artificial supplement or a UV light.

For most people, the focus is on getting a wide enough variety of degu safe plants in enough quantity all year round. I haven't seen much focus on people looking at specific plants for specific functions. I think this is at least partly because different animals metabolise foods in different ways so some compounds may or may not be active for degus.

[bouncy]

Knowing your location will be very helpful!

I feed 100% natural, and have had to supplement bit D3. Although most of the stuff they eat is dried, they have started to get fresh again as the garden wakes up again. As I live in Europe, what I feed is NOT from Chile, but they're happy and healthy enough!

[gondigo]

Thanks moletteuk and bouncy . I live in southeast part of China. It is a subtropical monsoon climate zone so I need to have airconditioner or dehumidifier on almost all time.  And as you can imagine, local herbs/vegetables are very different.

I got two degu just out of weaning, 8 weeks and 6 weeks old , adopted by chance from another owner. 

For now I am feeding Supreme Science Selective for degus, mixed with sunflower seed and pumkin seeds about 3-4 pieces per degu four times a week, pot marigold/dandelion leaves/dandelion roots/hawthorn leaves and flowers/rose petals/dill seeds about once a week, very small quantity of cabage/broccoli once a week and unlimited timothy grass. All of these are dry. For their daily playtime outside , I observe that they like biting a broken wall (I suspected some talcum leaks out) and a bag of iron powder. I try to stop them multiple times as those are certainly not designed for food, but they just do that so consistently that it let me ponder they probably have developed some micronutrient deficiency. I haven't done a proper blood test to figure out though, sinceI don't have proper vet nearby. Pet hospitals in local area have very bad reputation and they generally dont take exotic pets. 

Some of the natural foods listed in this forum are difficult/expensive to obtain here. Therefore I am looking local food replacements.  I am also worried about pesticide used in most agriculture so I only limited myselfs for some known suppliers and my choices are also very limited. I see people feeds Bok Choy in some posts. But bok choy have large varieties and the nutritions can vary a lot! Some contain high dose of nitrate even harmful for human for long time consumption so I am not sure if I cannot identify which 'bok choy" it is. 

Unfortunately I don't have a garden. Thier cage is nearby a window facing south which I can open in the morning for some sunlight.

BTW, I saw apology72 feeds twice a week Plantains (Musa × paradisiaca)?  I thought it is high in high amount of carbohydrates and high in sugar thus bad for kidney. Same goes to puffed rice.

White millet and quinoa are difficult/expensive. I am thinking to replace with Setaria italica but I don't understand the rationale about these two on apology72 's menu. And dill seeds and hawthorn leaves/flowers are also in the to-be-replaced list. 

[bouncy]

All varieties of Choi are fine, but watch out for trapped gas with things like Chinese broccoli. Gwai lo usually mean this for bok choi



Let me have a chat with my (Chinese) mum over the next couple of days, and we'll see if we can work out some other ingredients. Cantonese names, tho

[moletteuk]

The thread you have been looking at was from right at the start of people figuring out natural diets, so we have learned more since then and moved on from some of the things being fed at that time. Since dental issues are so prevalent in degus, people did a lot of thinking about how diet affects this and calcium and vitamin d content of the diet became very important. Calcium content needs to be around 1.2% and phosphorus content needs to be half the calcium content. Basically plants and some oil seeds have good calcium content and phosphorus is in high quantities in grains. In the end people decided that grains were not necessary and made the correct calcium to phosphorus ratio impossible and so they decided to focus on feeding a wide range of plants and some high calcium oil seeds. The oil seeds also contain lots of other minerals, fatty acids and other nutrients.

If you read our feeding guide it explains a fair amount of what we know about degu nutrition, although it doesn't cover 100% natural diets deguworld.proboards.com/thread/16425/degu-feeding-guide

Our nutrition charts will probably be useful: deguworld.proboards.com/thread/15602/vegetable-seed-nut-nutrition-charts

If you browse our natural feeding threads from late 2012 onwards, you will get a better idea of what is now considered suitable. Also, like I mention above, the other forum and website above are all about natural feeding.

[gondigo]

Thanks bouncy ! It is really difficult to find healthy Chinese food for degu. I am kind of hesitating with Bok Choy as most of them are controversal.

In your picture, the left one seems to be the one we call "shanghai green" , belongs to the family of "small bok choy" its latin name should be Brassica chinensis L..

It contains high amount of nitrate after several days of harvest and it could turn into nitrite in stomache. A recent news in China reveals that many of these contains much higher dose of nitrate than suggested amount of intake. 

The right one we call "big bok choy", its latin name should be Brassica pekinensis (Lour.) Rupr. Seems to have the same problem, but not much news coverage .

But whether nitrate is good is still in debt scientifically. 


[1] www.webmd.com/diet/foods-high-in-nitrates
[2] Michael P. Hezel, Ming Liu, Tomas A. Schiffer, Filip J. Larsen, Antonio Checa, Craig E. Wheelock, Mattias Carlström, Jon O. Lundberg, Eddie Weitzberg,Effects of long-term dietary nitrate supplementation in mice,Redox Biology,Volume 5,2015,Pages 234-242,ISSN 2213-2317,https://doi.org/10.1016/j.redox.2015.05.004.

[gondigo]

moletteuk

Thank you very much for your detailed explaination I would check those forums out.

Yeah...Dental problem is one of my concern. I checked those posts, but they are very general . I kind of need to work out a detailed diet planning with correct amount of food correlating to weight and age.

[moletteuk]

Bear in mind that youngsters eat more than adults. Adults are said to eat around 15g total per day, but growing youngsters can easily eat 25g. If you are feeding natural it is wise to provide an excess of food so they can self select what they eat at least to a degree.

Brassicas tend to have quite poor calcium content, so they should only be a small part of the diet.

I would look into obtaining a high calcium oil seed mix as a priority.

[gondigo]

moletteuk Thanks for your suggestion, that's completely new to me. For a month or two, I think I will still stick to commercial food until I find a reliable menu.

Does 25g include hay ? I checked a survey paper mentioned that after two years the portion of healthy degu is very low (something around 12%) due to commercial food. I once tried to give them "abundant" food (16g-18g for each) for a few days, but I observed them tend to avoid eating hay and it's sort of worrying so I was forced to reduce their commercial food amount again and again up to 5g each (with 3g-4g random natural mixes) to make them eat more hay, this also leads to increased frictions between the two goo that they will fight for the scarce commercial nugget.

Another thing is my degu do the same things that paper says, that they tend to eat young leaves of timothy grasses which I believe is not that good for their dental health.

In my country there are two kinds of timothy grasses in pet market, "north timothy" and "south timothy". The "north timothy" contains more stems and less leaves (something around 70% stem and seems to be a bit older grasses), and my degu don't like them, the "south timothy" contains more leaves and less stems (something around 80% leaves) and they seems prefer that. Do you have a emperical number of the stem/leaves ratio?

I have many apple wood installed in their cage though and I am not sure if that will help but they did occationally grind their teeth on those.


"Then environmental food quality is high, degus feed selectively with preference for new leaves and young plants due to their low-fibre, high-protein content (Gutiérrez and Bozi-novic 1998, Veloso and Bozinovic 2000). In captivity, because of these natural food preferences, they refuse to eat an optimal amount of hay and prefer commercial food mixtures contain-ing alfalfa pellets, corn flakes, maize, grain mixture, nuts, rai-sins and other sweets. These diets have less abrasive properties resulting in reduction of chewing duration due to high dietary energy content and lower coarse fibre content (Wolf and others 1997, Wolf and others 1999, Crossley 2005). Crossley (1995) reported that a lack of tooth wear resulted in continuing erup-tion and abnormal incisor and cheek teeth coronal and apical elongation. This study shows that acquired dental disease is the most common health problem in pet degus and was found in 60·0% of all examined animals. In degus older than two years, the prevalence of dental diseases in the examined animals was 75·8%, which was significantly higher when compared with the group of younger animals."

[moletteuk]

The 15 and 25g include hay and forage.

Basically, most degus have a sweet tooth and crave carbohydrates, just like humans, so they will eat carb rich pellets first and the sweetest part of any forage or hay. It can be tricky to solve, but I would not limit pellets much until you can find a broad range of forage and seeds to offer instead. In my opinion, the safest way to move away from pellets is to offer more forage and in a large enough variety and a small amount of high calcium oil seeds and once the degus are used to that and develop a taste for it they should naturally start to eat fewer pellets. It's not safe to take away or severely limit pellets until you have the forage sorted.

Science Selective is a grains based pellet, so you could try to find a grass based pellet like some of the Versele Laga or Grainless JR Farm or Rosewood Naturals ones. They are less likely to favour these so much over forage and hay.

There is some nutrition info of hay here: www.guinealynx.info/hay_chart.html Generally, it's not worth getting bogged down in, because the best hay is the hay that they will eat. Degus can be very fussy about hay, you are likely to need to try different ones and even different batches can make a difference. Mine always preferred a bog standard meadow hay. Usually, once you offer a selection of forage, they are more likely to prefer that over hay. The only advantage hay has over mixed forage is the silica content makes it good for tooth wear.

It's important to remember that where possible the degus will always decide for themselves what they choose to eat, so all the science in the world can be futile sometimes.

In my opinion chewing wood is important for dental health, offer as many types of safe natural wood pieces and preferably natural branches and twigs as you can.

[bouncy]

I had a chat with my mum yesterday. Even in a city, she suggests foraging in parks, or even taking a walk in the country at the weekends. Most of the leaves and other plant material they eat should be available with you, too. My cousins on Lantau island make a point of taking a hill walk every weekend.

[gondigo]

moletteuk Thanks again for your kind and detailed reply. I think I will try to switch to a grass-based commercial first. Though you said it's not worth getting bogged down in in the grass, I still cannot help but wonder for the ideal grass for degu. During the research I found with a surprise that the "south timothy" I have kept feeding my degu seems more look like a "third-cut" north american timothy equivalent as there are more leaves, more soft and bad for dental health and too high in protein (link), and I checked closely the poop they did look a bit soft/gummy (the poops they left in litter tray would stick some sand on it and could stick on something) so I think I probably have fed the wrong grass the whole time. Charaterization in "all", "pre-bloom", "middle-bloom", and "full-bloom" is also confusing when checking out the products in American market ("first cut", "second cut", "third cut", "bounty cut"), I thought "first-cut" is best in terms of nutrition but it is also harvested "before bloom"?

[moletteuk]

The info in the Rabbitry blog does not tie in with the guinea lynx chart I linked above or my understanding of growing plants. Young plants, including grass, are higher in proteins and sugars and then as they grow the proteins and sugars decrease as the fibre content increases. Plants use protein and sugars to grow, the structure they grow is made of fibre. Also, as plants mature, the mineral content increases. The descriptions don't make sense to me either, in the UK grasses grow green shoots and leaves first and then the stalks grow along with the leaves, and then the flowers develop and then the greenness fades a little as the work of the plant is done for the year.

'Best' for nutrition depends how you look at it, higher fibre is best for gut health, but higher protein and carbs is what the degus are going to seek out. That's why, in my experience, the 'best' hay is the one they will eat, rejection rates for hay are so high that nothing else mattered to me after a while. Once you are feeding a variety of forage, you are only feeding hay for its silica content and abrasiveness on the teeth, it shouldn't be a major contributor to their nutrition anyway.

In the UK we don't get to know which cut the hay we are buying is, so it's not something I ever worried about. If you aren't content with your currrent hay, try something else. I would recommend a plain meadow hay.

[gondigo]

moletteuk I still couldn't find a reliable source about relationship between "first cut"/"second cut"/"third cut" and "all", "pre-bloom", "middle-bloom", and "full-bloom" . Google search shows that comments about the differences between the "cut" are similar.

Here is what I hypothesize, the "second cut"/"third cut" is harvest the grass which grows back after previous cut that could be the reason of why it is sort of counter-intuitive when relating to grass life-cycle.

I couldn't find "plain meadow hay" supply in my country. I am now feeding my degu "second cut" of american timothy grass due to the balance of nutrition and taste and they seems very happy about the grass and their poop become noticbly harder. So I think I will stick to this hay for a while after I find a local supply instead. For now, I only find one online shop that import the North American grasses and they are expensive. For anyone who live in China or live in nearby countries that can use TaoBao and interested, the name is called 幸福爱宠园, it is a selling agent for American Pet Diner

China grows timothy hay professionally in Min County, Gansu province, timothy grasses from there are cheap and regulated. But they don't have the fine charaterization system and advanced quality control like Canada and U.S, so quality between batch varies a lot, it is diffcult for degu keeper as they are so picky. My degu already reject one batch from there, I guess the reason could be the grasses for that particular batch are too old/stemmy . 

[gondigo]

I started to question natural diet, from the post such as deguworld.proboards.com/post/14428/thread , as it is very difficult to get the correct amount of nutrition intake, while keeping degu interested. So far I haven't seen a proper statistics proving natural diet is good (and which natural diet). 

"In the University of Michigan degu colony, elimination of fruit and sunflower seed supplements fromthe diet and use of an exclusive low-fiber, high-energy rodent chow (Prolab® RMH 2000, PMI International,
St Louis, MO ) reduced the incidence of diabetes and cat-aracts to near zero (Rush, 2010)." [1]

Also from the description below I know why people feed degu with Bok Choy, because it is really high in nitrogen...

"In controlled laboratory studies, degus exhibit a strong preference for low-fiber, high-nitrogen plants over high-fiber plants (Bozinovic, 1995; Gutiérrez and Bozinovic,1998). Other studies confirm that the degu will select high-quality foods when available (Kenagy et al., 1999;Torres-Contreras and Bozinovic, 1997). During the dry season, the degu can compensate for lower-quality food by increasing consumption, whereas in the laboratory the degu can lower its metabolic demands when food quality declines (Bozinovic et al., 1997; Mabry et al., 1988;Veloso and Bozinovic, 1993). Sakaguchi and Ohmur(1992) found that the degu has reduced digestive ability for fiber compared to the guinea pig and that the degu does not appear to readily consume an alfalfa-based diet." [1]

[1] Mark A. Suckow, Karla A. Stevens and Ronald P. Wilson (Eds.) - The Laboratory Rabbit, Guinea Pig, Hamster, and Other Rodents-Academic Press (2012)

[moletteuk]

Essentially, this is why I only fed a part natural diet and why we recommend on the forum a part natural diet. It's a lot of responsibility with not a lot of data to decide on a full natural diet, in my opinion.

I can tell you that one of the main drivers for natural diets is dental disease, rather than diabetes. Diabetes is rare as long as you don't feed artificial sugars or fruits. Dental disease is rife and there is anecdotal evidence that forage is beneficial for dental health and fresh forage in particular is beneficial for dental health.

Natural diets also have a benefit regarding enrichment, grazing and chewing are extremely important parts of degu behaviour. In my opinion you can achieve a similar beneficial effect from feeding a part natural diet.

[deguconvert]

My thoughts exactly, Moletteuk . . . only you said it much better!!