Compare Gerber's baby food to a whole rat and a popular kibble (all on a
dry-weight basis):
 
Whole Rat:          Protein: 60%,   Fat: 30%,   Carb:  2%,   Ash:  8%
Gerber s Baby Food: Protein: 45.8%, Fat: 41.7%, Carb: 12.5%, Ash: <1%
Totally Ferret:     Protein: 40%,   Fat: 24.4%, Carb: 37.7%, Ash:  7.2%
 
I'm not going to address the carbohydrate issue because I have recently
posted on it at length; just look in the archives for a review.  Suffice
it to say that a long-term diet of refined carbohydrates is linked to
insulinoma, so you should limit the amount of them you feed your ferret.
I will, however, address the issues of ash and fat.  I really hate the
term "ash." It got the name because when you burn food or carcasses (that
is, completely oxidize the organics), the stuff left over is, well, ash.
The term ash makes you think that the stuff isn't important.  However,
ash is the mineral part of a body.  For example, in most mammals, the
skeleton makes up about 15% of the body.  Depending on the species, the
skeleton can be about 50% mineral, 50% organic.  Burn away Gerber s baby
food and the amount of ash would be less than 1%.  Burn away Totally
Ferret and the ash content would be 7.2%.  Burn away a whole rat and the
ash remainder would be 8%.  Remember I mentioned a skeleton is roughly
15% of the body and about 50% of the skeleton was mineral?  That predicts
7.5% average ash content for a typical mammal, although it will vary
depending on species.  Gerber's baby food isn t even close, meaning it
is woefully inadequate in supplying a ferret's mineral needs, a finding
confirmed from a glance at the label that says it meets 0% of the calcium
requirements for infants.  Ash, or mineral, is an important part of an
adequate, nutritious diet, and baby food simply doesn t have it.
 
Gerber's baby food has a LOT of fat, and because of the ferret's short GI
tract and fast transit time, it cannot possibly absorb all of it in an
efficient manner (it's a bile salt, pancreatic juice, microvilli, and
bowel transit time thing).  Remember the "I Love Lucy" candy conveyor
belt skit?  The intestine is like a convoluted conveyor belt, which in
ferrets runs fast only four hours or so from start to finish.  In the "I
Love Lucy" skit, both the speed of the conveyor belt was increased, as
well as the amount of candy on the belt, with hilarious results.  The
same is true with the intestines except it isn't very funny; concentrated
nutrients may not have time to be absorbed before being eliminated.  Give
your ferret too much cream and the fat comes out the other end in a
demented version of a ferret creamer.  Moo.
 
This peeked my interest, so I fed a couple of ferrets nothing but baby
food for a couple days, and then took samples of their poop.  I put a bit
of the poop in a test tube, added pure distilled water, and mechanically
mixed it so everything was suspended, but you could just read print
through it.  I added some Sudan stain, mixed it again, then placed a
couple of drops on a microscope slide and covered it with a large cover
slip.  I heated the slide, plopped it on a microscope, and the sample won
the golden globes award: there was an abnormal amount of fecal fat
present in the sample which was evident by the large quantity of large
yellow-stained blobs of fat present.  How did I know the amount of fat
was abnormal?  Because using the same ferrets, I fed them Bob's Chicken
Gravy, a cream and kibble-based duck soup, mice, and kibble.  Bob's
Chicken Gravy meals resulted in a lot of fat as well, but only about half
of the amount seen from the baby food.  The kibble was almost to the
level of Bob's Chicken Gravy, and the mouse diet had hardly any fecal fat
in it at all.  The duck soup had roughly the same amounts of fecal fat in
the stool as the baby food, but the fat globules were larger.  Now, this
isn't a quantitative test, but it is common and accurate screening tool.
If you can see fat, then it is there (the amount of fat can vary from
sample to sample and you would need several days worth of poop to
accurately determine actual fat percentages).  To give you an idea of
the significance of these finding, rough as they are, the baby food is
roughly 40% fat, I estimated the creamy duck soup to be about 40-45% fat,
my Bob's Chicken Gravy is about 25% fat, the kibble was about 28% fat,
and the mouse diet was about 20-25% fat.  An evolutionary biologist or
nutritionist would see the food fat content and the fecal fat results as
an interesting story.  It may be a crappy tale, but someone has to climb
up on the poop deck to tell it.
 
Besides giving ferrets soft, sticky, stinky stools, fat can potentially
cause another problem.  Fat-soluble vitamins are called that because
they dissolve in fat rather than water.  If you have a limited amount
of fat-soluble vitamins in the diet, all that fat washing the digestive
tract MAY increase bowel transit time, decreasing the efficiency of
nutrient absorption (with time there is some adaptation to diets rich in
specific nutrients).  Moreover, fat-soluble vitamins may be absorbed by
the fat globules and be carried out of the body.  In a food like Bob's
Chicken Gravy where many nutrients are supposed to be slightly in
excess, washing a few out the back end doesn t make a lot of difference.
However, in a food like Gerber's baby chicken that meets zero percentages
of calcium or vitamin A (and presumably other fat-soluble vitamins), the
problem may be a bit more severe.  The food itself has such a low amount
of vitamin A that the percentage is considered zero, so the fat isn't
going to wash a lot of it out the back end.  However, if you are also
feeding them kibble or a vitamin supplement like Nutri-Cal, the fat CAN
wash fat-soluble nutrients out the booty, so your ferret is not getting
any from the baby food, and MAY be losing it from other parts of the diet
as well.  This is similar to what happens when people consume too much
mineral oil for long periods of time; they end up with fat-soluble
vitamin deficiencies.  Worse yet, all that fat and no supplemental source
of vitamins A, D, E or K can cause severe problems ranging from mild
osteoporosis to severe nutritional steatitis, and many diseases in
between.  Even if all that occurs is soft, sticky, smelly diarrhea
(called steatorrhea), then that is bad enough.  Try to clean that stuff
off the carpet.
 
The truth is, people feed ferrets Gerber's baby chicken all the time,
sometimes as the only source of nutrition for extended periods, and these
problems are not typically manifested.  One reason is because the body
stores nutrients and if they are only needed in trace amounts, it can
take a long time for a deficiency to be revealed (the liver can store up
to a year's worth of vitamin A, and bones can supply calcium to point
where they collapse and beyond).  Once a deficiency occurs, it takes even
more time for the symptoms of disease to show.  Thus, it might take a
year for a problem to show in a sick ferret that might only have a few
months left, so even though there is a real problem with nutrition, it is
never documented.
 
The biggest problem of all is that once the symptoms are present a vet
still has to properly diagnose them.  I am not busting the chops of
vets; even with human doctors and all their diagnostic equipment proper
diagnoses are difficult to make.  It is easy to diagnose malnutrition
when you see skin and bones, but much harder to make the call for
undernutrition when the victim looks normal.  In the case of baby
food, because there is so much fat the ferrets don't typically LOOK
malnourished, so looking for deficiencies in amino or fatty acids,
vitamins, or trace minerals isn't the first thing that crosses a vet's
mind.  Some symptoms of mal- or undernutrition mimic those of adrenal
disease or other common aliments.  A vet may not even realize a ferret
has a calcium deficiency until the bones are so osteoporotic that they
start to collapse.  For these and any number of other reasons,
nutritional problems in ferrets are underreported to some degree or
another.
 
Until then, my recommendation is that while Gerber's baby food is a good
snack or treat, and it can effectively be used as an occasional meal, I
cannot recommend it for a long-term nutritional regime unless other foods
or supplements are included to better balance the diet.  Chow, baby.
 
Bob C
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[Posted in FML issue 4648]