Quote Originally Posted by John View Post
Interesting stuff Bruce, thank you. What do you think of calcium enriched gutloading diets?
Hi John,

If they're good, they help. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, several studies suggest that many products for pets have no data to back up their use, and make claims with no evidence whatsoever. They even often do not even contain anything like what they're supposed to - amongst others, a paper in the Journal of Herpetological Medicine and Surgery found only one out of 4 diets actually helped the calcium levels of the crickets significantly, and one specific finding was that one of the diets (tested on several batches) only had 16.7% (roughly 1/6) of the container stated "minimum guaranteed" level of calcium!

Note that this was a purely isolated study - i.e. only looking at the crickets, not any effects of feeding, which might not correlate with a "real life" situation, but if the loading diet can't even raise the calcium level in the crickets above control levels it isn't likely to do much good.

For those interested, the diets in that paper were T-rex calcium plus food (the one that helped), ESU diet gut load, Jurassi pets gut load and Fluker high calcium cricket food.

So the answer is, unfortunately, you have to research which one(s) have some evidence to support their claims (or make your own - some formulae are available). But that takes effort which many poeple won't do unfortunately, hence sales of these supplements.

I'm not by any means saying they're all useless - but there appears to be very little control of these things.

Hope this helps, even if it doesn't give a neat answer unfortunately!

Bruce.