Quote:
Originally Posted by candyraver69
The difference between gutloading and feeding cat food directly to your reptile is that just the gut is full of the cat food, and you are still getting the nutritional content of the rest of the prey animal. It's the difference between having a pizza with pineapples on top and just eating a pineapple. Good enough analogy? Sure the reptile is getting some catfood, but in a package deal. I don't think cat food is "bad" for reptiles, just in pure form not balanced as eating the prey item... although as we agreed, some preservatives in some brands very much could be bad. With your third argument, I'm not arguing that feeding your roach a balanced diet would be the ideal situation, but at what cost? You have to weigh the benefit against the cost. And again, just feeding the roaches fresh food will nilly is NOT a balanced diet, and I think would be sub-par to cat food.
After all, is it healthier for a person to eat a nasty prepared frozen dinner with a variety of food groups like a TV dinner with veggies, meat, cheese, and grains, or just eat fresh apples all day? Neither is the best solution, the prepared food isn't perfect, but it's pretty balanced, where if you only ate apples, even though they are fresh food items, it's not got everything you need. Come on now... surely there are people here that know a vegetarian/vegan human can be nutritionally sound if they really carefully plan their diet to include everything they need, but the vast majority are depriving themselves of needed nutrients? Same concept applies here. If you are willing to really throw down the time to plan a balanced diet for your roaches, by all means do it! It's just far more complex and time consuming than your average person is going to want to deal with. Otherwise we would all be breeding our own rats fed on a fresh diet (no lab blocks at all, just FRESH food) for snakes rather than buying them from a breeder like rodentpro.
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Your analogy works well about the pizza, because its exactly my point. Pizza isnt healthy! Will it kill you? No. But is it healthy? Again, no not really (unless, like Congress, you believe pizza sauce is a vegetable
). As to your idea about vegetarians, most of the vegetarians I know are actually much more healthy than I am. The reason is because they pay much more attention to what they eat. So again, thank you for bringing up that point. Will a 'willy nilly' fresh diet improve them? Of course not, but that was never what we were discussing here. Our roaches will be healthier too if we pay more time and attention to what they eat, and therefore they will be healthier food items for our reptiles. Wouldnt it be better to improve the diet of our feeder items so much that we never needed to dust or supplement again? I think its possible.
As to your point about costs, we arent talking a huge difference. Each week I spend about $12 on food in total for around 1000 roaches (today I spent $3 for green beans, $2 for bananas, $1.50 raisins, $3 for kale, $1 for squash and I estimate the amount of cost from their dried food bags to be about $1.50). Now that is here in New York City, where everything is expensive, so Im sure it might even be cheaper for others. I know that feeding them just a bunch of dried cat food is cheaper, maybe only $3 a week or so (Im just guessing here). But if a few bucks a week is too much to improve your animals life, then perhaps we are having the wrong discussion.
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