The Best Bird Food

It would only make sense to begin with the basics of parrot nutrition as it applies to all parrots.

Any of us who have parrots in our lives already know that parrots who live in the Wild, the great outdoors from where they came consume all sorts of natural foodstuffs that we, as humans, would probably find sickening to our palate.

In the course of a normal day we might find any one of a number of species of parrots foraging through trees for nuts, bushes for seeds and flowers, the ground for bugs, worms and even dirt and all other places we are not aware of for many other types of foods that we wouldn’t even think of.

The research is still out on just how all of these foodstuffs, and the nutrients they contain, work within the specialized digestive system of each species to keep them buzzing in a healthy way. But they do. Somehow, in the Wild, these birds of the air remain strong and vibrant. By keeping their species so strong they multiply and reproduce to keep their species alive for us to look in awe and wonder with pure enjoyment.

But we have brought them inside our domain. We have taken them out of their environment. We are attempting to domesticate them. My discussion is not whether our attempt is “right” or “wrong”, my discussion is simply “how” to care for them now that we “have” taken them out of their natural environments.

It only makes sense that we begin with the basic of all basics, nutrition. It is health, after all, that is the sustenance, the life force, for all of us, which keep our hearts beating, and all of our organs functioning properly.

There is no way we can even begin to think we can imitate what any parrot would consume on any given day in their natural environment. It would be folly to think we could. But it is my belief that we can do so much better than to throw only highly processed foods in front of them each and every day, without adding fresh, whole foods, and think they can survive, let alone thrive.

Take a look at our own diets, for example. We constantly hear on the news, read in magazines, in doctor’s journals, hear from our own doctors, and many other highly respected sources that we, as a society need to get away from eating highly processed foods. Yet, we continue to eat them, why? Because consuming highly processed foods are easy. Not because they are good for us. We know processed foods aren’t good for us. We know it. Yet we continue to stuff them into our faces because we can. No one stops us. It’s our right! We have the right to kill ourselves if we want to! Yes, KILL ourselves with all of the mashed up, ground up, GMO-laden, preservative-kept, pesticide-hidden, nutritive-lacking, cardboard-tasting, nothingness. And we have taught our taste buds to actually accept and grow to “like” this stuff; that’s the satirical humor about all of this craziness. We have actually learned to like this empty nutrition!

Now we are teaching our pets to learn to like the same kind of processed foods that we have learned to like. Why? Because it is easy for us.

As pet caregivers, we have to stop and think about this cycle for a moment. We have to learn to respect the living body, not only ours, but we have to learn to respect our pets’ bodies as well. If we truly love our pets as much as we say we do, then it will show in how we treat them and how we care for them. It will show in their overall health and vitality.  Anyone who comes into our house will be able to look at our pets and know just how much we love our pets simply by looking at them. If we truly love our pets their environment will be clean and well kept. This includes their cage and all of their perches, water bowls and toys. Their food will be fresh and clean as well. The word “nutrition” doesn’t only mean “what kind of food one is fed” in my book. “Nutrition” is the overall care one gives to the daily life of our pet. It also involves making sure that our pet receives daily attention and play time activity. Think about it, even you need these things in your life in order to thrive, not just survive.  So how much more will our pets need these things, as well as our attention, in order to thrive and have a life full of joy and vitality? After all, they depend on us for everything.

But back to the kind of food a parrot needs to properly activate its digestive system and thrive. In the wild your parrot would be eating fresh foods, not highly processed, cardboard-looking, preservative and pesticide-laden, mashed together powders. These alien-looking things just aren’t found in the Wild. Instinctively, parrots would naturally go straight for leaves, fruits, nuts, seeds, bark, bugs, worms, dirt, flowers, berries, and the like. All of these natural, whole foods contain all of the nutrients such as the vitamins, amino acids, as well as the “good fats”, and all of the macro and micro nutrients they need to thrive with abundant vitality. Parrots also instinctively know what they need to heal themselves if they become ill. In the Wild there are many natural items that heal. Barks, flowers, dirt, and many other items contain substances that naturally heal without the use of  laboratory-developed pharmaceuticals.

So how do we begin to mimic this kind of diet in our homes?  Many of us don’t have the time to prepare fresh food each and every day for our parrots. We are living in fantasy-land if we think we can. If we can’t even do this for ourselves, how do we think we can do this for our parrots? We can’t. So we have to begin with a base commercial diet. No, I’m not going to promote anyone’s brand here.  That is not my objective. I will, however, give you my opinion on what to look for when you are attempting to choose a brand for your parrot’s base diet. Good luck in finding what I will be suggesting because I will be telling you what “not” to buy, more than I will be telling you what “to” buy.

By law, manufacturers must list the ingredients in the order of the quantity of which they are placed by volume or by weight in the product. That is the first thing you must remember when you are purchasing your parrot’s food. That being said, do not buy any food that lists these ingredients first: corn, rice, wheat or gluten, or soy. These are empty nutrients, but can wreak huge amounts of damage and harm. And remember, because manufacturers must list ingredients in the order of the volume they are contained in the product, if any of these ingredients are listed first, and because these ingredients are basically “empty” in nutrition, then you will have to feed a lot of food in order for your bird to receive any nutritional value out of each serving. This can, and probably will result in a bird who suffers obesity but is malnourished overall.

Say what? How can a parrot suffer malnutrition, but still be obese? Simple, think about it. If a living creature senses it has to eat and eat and eat in order to support its required nutritional values, it will end up taking in more calories than it can realistically utilize in a given day of activity. And, yet, even though this creature consumes large amounts of this empty-nutritional food source, it can be overweight still lacking in overall nutrition, because…the food doesn’t contain the proper kind of nutrition. This is the same thing us humans suffer from eating highly processed foods that are heavy-laden with corn, wheat and soy fillers. Fillers. Yes, these ingredients are nothing but cheap fillers manufacturers use to “bulk” up their products to make money off of you, their indebted customer. And if you think about it, you have to actually buy more of the product in question in order to actually get that “satisfied” feeling, especially if it is labeled and sold as a “low fat” product. The food manufacturing industry is “gaming” us, and we haven’t even caught on to their trick, yet. We would be much further ahead to purchase high quality products, eat less of those products, because we would feel satisfied quicker, because we would be receiving the REAL nutrition our bodies need, good, high quality nutrition, and then we would not be buying low-quality, highly-processed products that are making us the obese Nation we have come to be. Anyway…

Let me go into further detail about each ingredient I listed above.

First, let’s look at corn. Corn is a sugary vegetable, or some actually categorize it as a grain. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to digest. Although manufacturers will tout that it’s high in vitamin A, there are other food sources that are much more reliable in the actual bioavailability of vitamin A that don’t break down into sugar once in the digestive tract. The “sugar” that corn breaks down into can wreak all kinds of havoc once in the system, one problem being yeast infections. And this, as many parrot owners know, is one of the main “bad guys” our parrots fight on a regular basis. Sugar also can lead to obesity as well as fatty liver disease. So if corn can’t be digested, and the only thing our parrots really get out of it is sugar, what is it doing as the main ingredient in our parrots’ diets? It just doesn’t belong there.

Rice is much the same as corn except that it is in the category of grains. Other than that, it breaks down virtually the same way as corn, it turns into sugar in the digestive tract.

Second, let’s take a look at wheat. Once touted for its high protein content, we now know that it also contains gluten.  Gluten is bad for a couple of reasons. First of all it is a highly indigestible protein. It’s what makes most humans grow that mid-section “gut”. It is responsible for Celiac’s Disease. It gets into the gut, and like sludge, it just sits and sits there while waiting on the stomach acids to slowly digest it. But we know that parrots don’t have a high acid content in their digestive tract to digest proteins like gluten. In addition to being an indigestible protein, gluten causes many people to have allergic reactions to wheat, again, this is because of the indigestibility of wheat proteins, it attacks the mast cells in a living creature’s body and activates the histamine receptors.

Third,let’s look at soy, or soy protein, as the base ingredient in our parrots’ food. I just have to take a big, long sigh at the thought of this ingredient and how it has been promoted over the last decade. It’s just not the cure all that we have been sold on. Yes, we are told that soy is high in protein and that it is easily digestible, but this is not true. First of all, in order to obtain any real nutrition from soy it must be cooked at high temperatures to break down the trypsin inhibitors in order for the protein to be made available as real nutrition. In addition, because the trypsin inhibitors in soy interfere with protein digestion it is suspected this may cause pancreatic disorders leading to diabetes. The plant estrogens found in soy can disrupt overall endocrine function. Furthermore, what the manufacturers don’t tell us is that it is also a phyto-hormone that can disrupt your parrot’s delicate hormonal balance.  Also, it is suspected that hypothyroidism and thyroid cancer may be caused by soy phyto-estrogens. Finally, soy can inhibit the assimilation of calcium, magnesium, copper, iron, and zinc.  In my own and personal opinion, soy is just too scary to mess with, not enough research is in, to be using as a base and voluminous ingredient in anyone’s food, let alone such a delicate and fragile creature such as a parrot.

So what should you be looking for as the BASE ingredient to your bird’s commercial food? I would promote a “green” food, something like alfalfa, barley grass, wheatgrass, or the like, even if the green food is powdered. It doesn’t have to be whole, although whole, chopped, would be even better. Wheatgrass is nothing like wheat itself. Wheatgrass is not the grain of the wheat product. It is the tender green shoots that contain all of the enzymes and amino acids that are so vitally important to health and vitality.

Along with a healthy base ingredient you should be looking for lots and lots of other fresh, whole-food ingredients in your parrot’s commercial diet. This would include, but not limited to, a wide variety of fresh organic fruits, nuts, seeds, herbs, berries, flowers, and spices, with a limited amount of vegetables and beans added in, preferably all in their whole form, or at least in a partially whole or chopped form. Why? Because whole-food nutrition leaves all of the macro and micro nutrients in tact within each and every food. As soon as a food is cut, sliced, ground or powdered, and especially when it is cooked, it begins to lose its nutrients. Except in the case of some foods, where they actually need to be at least partially cooked to release some of their nutrients.

This is just an introduction to Parrot Nutrition 101. I will be discussing nutrition on an ongoing basis, and in depth, as we take this journey through each and every species throughout our Best Bird Food Blog. I hope you will travel along with me by subscribing up to receive email updates.

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Machelle Pacion / The BEST Bird Food / BirD-elicious! / Passion Tree House LLC © 2012 All Rights Reserved

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