Chinchilla-Scientia-Forum.de

Food analysis
The question is, how to analyse food - I'll give you here a short summary. A common solution is the proximate or Weende analysis (in German Weender Analyse). It is a simple and cheap way to analyse foods and its nutrients, but it is not very accurate. Therefore there are some additional refining analysis especially for the carbohydrate and fibre determination. Besides starch and sugar determination the most important ones are the ones described by van Soest (1991) and uses the following three extracts:
* NDF (Neutral Detergent Fiber), it consists of hemicelluloses, die pectins, cellulose, and lignin and represents plant cell walls.
* ADF (Acid Detergent Fiber), it consists of cellulose and lignin, together also called as "lignocellulose". With the difference of ADF and NDF the hemicelluloses (good digestible fibre) can be calculated. The difference between ADF and ADL gives the cellulose.
* ADL (Acid Detergent Lignin), it consists of lignin and represents indigestible fibre.

In addition the French researcher Dr. Gidenne defined an additional term for rabbit nutrition:
* DF (Digestible Fibre): it is the sum of hemicelluloses (NDF-ADF) and water insoluble pectins (WIP)
It seems that this type of fibre is also important in the nutrition of chinchillas and degus, but unfortunately there is no research at the moment in this specific topic.

The digestibility of all this fibre compounds are determined for rabbits and give us a coarse clue even it is probably slightly different for the degus:
* digestibility of pectins is 70-76 %
* digestibility of hemicellulose is 25-35%
* digestibility of cellulose is 15-18 %
* digestibility of lignin is 10-15 %

Further readings:
* "Frankreich "füttert" Faserfraktionen" http://www.klausing.com/futterdoc/Kanin ... rtikel.htm
* A short description of the proximate analysis: http://feed-additives.evonik.com/produc ... lysis.aspx
* van Soest, P.J.; Robertson, J.B.; Lewis, B.A. (1991): Methods for dietary fibre, neutral detergent fibre and non starch polysaccharids in relation to animal nutrition. Journal of Dairy Science 74, 3583-3597
Free PDF: http://webpages.icav.up.pt/PTDC/CVT/098 ... 201991.pdf