My personal experience is that I have ZERO issues feeing ASF, Rats or Mice to my balls. Most will readily eat whatever is placed in their tub and I routinely switch back and forth (based on what I have the current size of). I lost all my rats several months ago to a food issue and had to feed mice and ASF exclusively for about 5 months to my entire collection. I have since switched all of them back to rats without issue. So I have been feeding ASF, rats and mice back and forth for over a year (and had switched snakes eating only ASF for almost 5 months back to rats without a problem)

However, like everything about BP there are exceptions...and some will imprint on one food item and eat nothing else - weather that be ASF, Rats, Mice, Gerbils, etc.

As an example, my breeder male Pastel goes off feed ever year for about 6 months and when he comes back on will ONLY take ASF for the first 2 months then he switches to eat anything ...strange but that is how he rolls.

From my experience it is a wives tale.

Hope this helps.