[racinghamster]

In the wild, depending on which part of the world they originate from, hamsters will hoard seeds, grains, roots, grasses and some insects. Commercially kept hamsters don`t have that choice, so they are fed what the manufacturers state is correct, when the reality is, most of the mixes they churn out are filled with fillers like maize, corn (which are starchy carbohydrates) and grass pellets which are never eaten, so how they can say their foods are `nutritionally balanced` when much of it never gets eaten is not correct.

I feed the aforementioned Burgess Supahamster Harvest mix, but I add a lot of other seperates to it in order to `beef` it up. My roborovski eats this mix mainly although my syrian gets some aswell. He is fed on the Tesco hamster mix (used to be on Harry Hamster) but he got bored with it. Too many large biscuits and not much else.

No mix will be 100% balanced if the hamster doesn`t eat it all and the majority of hamsters can be fed too much sometimes, which is why food gets uneaten. If the hamster chooses not to eat something in the mix, that`s their own way of saying they either don`t find it pallatable, or they instinctively know they don`t need it.

This is why I buy seperate grains and seeds like buckwheat, organic porridge oats, hemp seed, mealworms, budgie tonic mix/millets and feed mung beans, apple and some other vegetables raw. The more variety they can have, the better I find. It`s not really about sticking to the one mix, it`s about looking at what they eat and enjoy.

A good balance between carbs, protein and fibre with low fat is what to aim for. I would personally like to see a commercial hamster food that looked more like a proper human museli without all the added brick-like peas, corn and alfalfa and more flaked wholegrains.