Member of Warning Quick Facts Pocket Pets Casper (Albino Sugar Glider) Sugar Gliders As Pets? ... Splish splash. Are Sugar Gliders Lactose Intolerant? Those readers that frequent the internet may have noticed several articles written about sugar glider nutrition that state that gliders are lactose intolerant and, therefore, should not be fed dairy products. However, this information is misleading. There have been very few studies done specifically on sugar gliders but there have been numerous studies on wallabies and kangaroos (macropods). Macropods are lactose intolerant. Their milk contains low levels of this carbohydrate or sugar. If they are fed higher levels than that which they were designed to consume, they have a tendency to bloat and develop colic and diarrhea, which are the common clinical signs associated with lactose intolerance. In the absence of information collected specifically from sugar glider studies, there has been a tendency to group gliders together with other marsupials. But what applies to macropods doesn't always apply to sugar gliders and lactose intolerance is a case in point. While gliders and macropods are both marsupials, that is where their similarity ends. We would not presume to compare a deer to a flying squirrel just because they are both placental mammals, so why insist on making such a faulty comparison between two very different marsupial mammals? It is true that sugar gliders have low levels of the carbohydrate lactose in their milk but they are able to metabolize higher amounts because their milk contains the enzyme beta-galactosidase, which is able to metabolize the excess lactose quite successfully. | |
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