Product Review: Lugarti Premium Dubia Diet

Ingredient Analysis

Lugarti Premium Dubia Diet has a very comprehensive, impressive-looking ingredient list. I like that this dubia roach food has a focus on not just producing nutritious feeders, but healthy ones, too.

Alfalfa, bee pollen, calcium, vitamin D, and probiotics are the ingredients that I’m most impressed with at a glance. Alfalfa is a very nutritious plant that is arguably one of the best things that can be fed to an herbivorous feeder. Pollen is frequently found on wild insects, as they are used by plants as pollinators, so pollen is a regular part of the diet for insectivores such as chameleons. It’s even arguably a regular part of an omnivore’s wild diet, as they eat not only insects, but flowers as well. Calcium and vitamin D are essential for balancing an insect’s natural calcium to phosphorus ratio and supporting reptiles that receive UVB and no supplemental vitamin D.

I’m especially impressed by the inclusion of probiotics, as these will be passed to the reptile upon ingestion, creating a more nutritious and beneficial feeder. According to John Courteney-Smith, “The live gut flora of a reptile’s stomach is also directly linked to the animal’s immune system. If the immune system is targeted and depleted…the animal will be left with less protection from outside infections and could become more prone to internal stress and disease.”²

One of the big concerns with any feeder insect diet is protein content. It is well known that for omnivores and herbivores, eating a diet that is too high in protein can cause uric acid to accumulate and cause a painful condition called gout. But insectivores and carnivores can also suffer from gout when the animal foods that they eat contain higher than normal amounts of protein.

And in the case of dubia roach food, protein content is an especial concern because unlike most animals, cockroaches don’t excrete the excess protein that they consume in the form of uric acid. Instead, according to a 1988 study by Radha Pant, they store it in their fat for future conversion back into protein as needed³. This is a useful survival mechanism for roaches. But for the reptiles that eat them, it can be detrimental.

From my observation, it seems that the only dubia roach food that tends to result in gout is fish food. Which makes sense — from a brief survey of popular fish foods, I found that fish food tends to have a crude analysis of 43% protein or more. I haven’t been able to find any sources that confirm an ideal amount of protein for dubia roaches or roaches in general, but according to research by Dubia Roach Depot, a 25% protein diet can be considered reasonable for raising healthy roaches that reproduce normally⁴. In other words, there’s no reason to provide such a high protein diet, and doing so is likely to be harmful to the roaches as well as to the reptile eating them.

Lugarti Premium Dubia Diet is much lower in protein — just 13.2%. However, that may not necessarily be a bad thing, as in the same article, Dubia Roach Depot points out that while a 25% protein diet is good for the long-term health of roaches, it may encourage uric acid accumulation in the feeders, which makes it unsuitable as a gut load. Instead, they encourage “purging” feeder roaches on a low-protein diet for a short period of time before feeding to a reptile. They also point out that as long as a reptile has sufficient access to water and is otherwise healthy, it should be able to purge excess dietary protein and uric acid in the form of urate. I’m not an expert on dubia roaches or any kind of cockroach, but 13.2% seems like a safe middle-of-the-road number for creating a dubia roach food that can double as a gutload.

The other concern that I experienced when looking at Lugarti Premium Dubia Diet’s ingredients list was the fact that the first five ingredients are grains and seeds. Grain is not necessarily a bad thing when gut loading insects. Many insects will readily eat grain on their own, and grains and seeds contain many vitamins and minerals. However, the presence of so much grain raises concerns about the presence of phytic acid.

Phytic acid is found in varying quantities in seeds, grains, nuts, legumes, and some vegetation. It has its own beneficial properties, but in excess it has the strong ability to bind with metals. This includes iron, magnesium, calcium, and zinc, which are essential mineral nutrients. Phytic acid reduces a reptile’s ability to digest and assimilate foods properly, which can lead to mineral deficiency. You can see how this can be a major issue when feeder insects are given foods with a high phytic acid content.

In a list of foods with a high phytic acid content, you can find rice bran, maize/corn, soybeans, wheat, and wheat bran, among others⁵. Bran tends to have an especially high amount of phytic acid. And according to John Courteney-Smith: “…an animal that does not have access to a correctly re-created wild UV index or adequate D3 supplementation but has a diet high in phytic acid could be more at risk from the conditions we know as MBD…”

Fortunately, there are ways to reduce the amount of phytic acid in high-phytic acid foods:

• Soaking the food in question in water for at least 8 hours releases the phytase enzyme and initiates phytic acid breakdown.
• Eating foods high in vitamin C alongside high-phytic acid foods will mitigate the effects of phytic acid.

With that information in hand, I would recommend pre-soaking small batches of Lugarti Premium Dubia Diet for at least 8 hours before giving it to your roach colony. The presence of strawberries in Lugarti’s recipe — strawberries being naturally high in vitamin C — may also play a role in balancing out the grains on the ingredients list. If you are very concerned, separating roaches intended for feeding in the next 24-48 hours and giving them only a non-grain, plant-based food during this time can help clear them out.