Birds eating balanced diets should have no trouble satisfying their nutritional needs during a molt. However, to provide a margin of safety, birds are fed a diet with extra proteins, vitamins and minerals during this time-special need diets. For birds not fed commercial balanced diets owners should add egg to their birds' food or other food with high quality protein. Feathers are mostly made from protein. But this is an oversimplification as the balance of amino acids in feather proteins are very different from the other organs of the body.
Feathers contain huge quantities of the sulphur containing amino acids.
We further supplement these amino acids with a highly bio-available sulphur source that seems to enable the birds to make feathers even more efficiently. When the bird wants to molt it obviously requires lots of the sulfur containing amino acids. We provide large quantities of these in Feather-Up and to a lesser extent in Fussy Feeder Essentials. The Center for Animal Nutrition at the Hanover Veterinary School has demonstrated conclusively the molting tonics without sulfur containing amino acids simply don't work. Firstly feather quality will be maximized.