Sugar is TOXIC!

[Pajarita]

This is, of course, meant for humans but we can easily extrapolate the info to our parrots and conclude that anything that has processed sugar is a complete no-no for birds!

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/sugar- ... id=U305DHP

[Wolf]

Read this article on MSN this morning, but refined sugar has been called " white death" among the people that I have known for at least 20 years, so I was not surprised by this at all.

[seagoatdeb]

Makes sense to me, i think that the more processed something is the more it is removed from natural healthy eating.

[seagoatdeb]

The other thing I think is hard for birds are what is hard about pellets, and it is that pellets are cooked and so the fats are saturated, The pellet is dry and hard, so hard on the body. So I only serve my birds anything cooked on a very sparse level, and then it is birdie bread, sweet potatoe, legumes and grains. The rest of the time it is soaked and sprouted only, for grain, legumes, nuts and seeds. I am trying to be as close to natural diets as I can.

[Michael]

This article doesn't actually demonstrate sugar to be toxic but rather that it has a long term adverse effect on health.

However, I do suspect that sugar could be outright toxic to a parrot in severe quantity in the same way that salt is. A parrot swallowing a few cubes of sugar could become dehydrated possibly to the point of death.

[seagoatdeb]

I agree Michael, and anything is toxic to humans if you have too much of it so the same will be true for parrots.