Nutrition

My interest in mouse nutrition started around three years ago, when one of my mice started to become overweight. Up until this point I had always fed a standard Hamster mix, as many people do, and having never had any real problems with it it had never occured to me not to! As always my first reaction on noticing a problem with my mouse was to try and find out what was wrong and what I could do about it. Many of you will not be suprised to discover that this mouse was a red based colour and I quickly came across articles talking about red mice becoming overweight (see Obesity). I immediately switched all my mice to a diet lower in fat, but I had begun to wonder about mice not carrying the obese gene and whether them not becoming overweight was in anyway a guarentee that their diet was good for them.

When I then started keeping rats and came across the Shunamite diet (see feeding or further reading) I was inspired! To my knowledge it is the only homemade diet that was created by going right back to basics and looking at what the nutritional requirements of the animal were, before finding out the nutritional content of possible ingredients to create a diet that actually meets the animal’s needs. By this point I suspected that mice were very similar to rats in their requirements and it occured to me that if I could find proof of this then I would have a diet for my mice that could potentially not only prevent obesity but also improve their overall health and maybe even life expectancy!

After much researching I came across this in depth, scientific report on the nutritional requirements of mice. Coincidentally I’ve since realised that Alison Campbell had used the same source for her rat diet. From it I was able to draw up the following chart stating the nutritional requirements of mice. For comparison purposes I have included the data for rats in orange and that of hamsters in green.
table still under construction