ABSTRACT
The subject of this chapter is difcult because of its complexity and intricacy, but most especially because it is inherently reliant on circumstantial evidence to explain why certain diets succeed while others fail. Even the concepts of success and failure are complex, because they can be subjective and dependent upon the specic situation and application. These complexities have motivated a careful search of historical progression of some of the most well-established diets. The effort to understand the reasons why certain diet components seem to work well in our goal to rear healthy and reliable populations of insects has led inexorably to several main ingredients that crop up frequently and in a large variety of diets, with respect to the diversity of species that these diets support. In this chapter, what was sought whenever possible was a rationale for the use of a component and the mechanism of its role in diets.
