Help with homemade mix sources

[AmityvilleHams]

Alpacassei makes an excellent point with survival and outward signs not always showing the true longterm effects of a bad diet, homemade or otherwise. You'll see this with any species, humans included. Things like heart disease, obesity, and even mental health of all the things can be impacted by diet(especially vitamin deficiencies in the case of mental health). To me it's like saying a person can live 80 years and smoke every day so therefore smoking is perfectly fine, which is definitely not true.

We definitely don't do blood tests with hamsters like with humans and even some pets(mostly done with parrots), so it's impossible for us to say that any vitamin for example B12 is actually going to be in the least scientific terms possible absorbed from a 100% natural whole food diet.

Plus, impacts of a bad diet can take an incredibly long time to actually show and as we don't do autopsies on hamsters either it would be quite hard to know if there actually was any diet-related illness and/or death because of such a diet.

[LilacTofu]

So in essence, "you can't tell if your own hamster is healthy or not via outward signs and you also can't tell via inward signs either because blood tests and autopsies aren't typically done on hamsters"... I fail to see how this is proving that my diet is unsuitable or will cause deficiency, while standardized mixes or commercial foods are better.

As you said, you can smoke until the day you die, but couldn't that analogy apply to commercial foods as well? If your hamsters are living long lives and appear outwardly healthy, then imo you're doing something right. Otherwise.. what are we even basing this on? Which type of food is more popular? I mean, there's nothing wrong with that either. People can feed whatever they want to their hams and if they feel more comfortable with popular foods, that's perfectly acceptable, too.

But I do think it's kind of silly to tell people they can't create their own diets, especially since decent foods are often not available in other countries and hey, not everybody can or even wants to import food from Germany or the UK or whatever.