Gloop II

[seagoatdeb]

Unless you pick your veggies from your own garden every morning, frozen veggies have more nutrition. Once picked, produce starts loosing it's value. Frozen veggies are frozen within an hour of picking. I don't think I would take frozen veggies, cook them and refreeze them. Most frozen veggies they will eat raw once thawed. They have to be at lease room temp.
I use zip lock bags to portion ahead of time for frozen to give them a variety. I also use zips for my grain so I don't have to think about portion or variety at that time of the morning.

Frozen fruit and veggies have more nutrition than produce that was picked, traveled and then put in the store.

Not always Liz. Frozen veggies are better to use if you cant get fresh picked or from a local source. Frozen from a supermarket often have more nutrition, I agree, but fresh has the most when its really "fresh" The general rule is three days. if the food has been picked less than 3 days old it has more nutrition than frozen. If the food was transported from far away it is going to be over 3 days and not as fresh as frozen. In the winter I do have to use more frozen. Sweet potatotes get more nutritious when stored at room temperature. They lose nutrition when stored cool or frozen. The current "FAD" that is saying fozen is better than fresh is wrong, and every fruit and vegetable degrades at a different rate. Also, if you buy frozen chopped it has degraded from the chopping. Also frost free fridges use freeze thaw cycles and they can cause damage to food while being stored frozen. For this reason in labs, where they do experiments, they do not use freeze/thaw. What I am saying here is it is not as simple as saying one is better than the other.

Our modern way of looking at nutrition is often flawed. They look at vitamins and dont look at what else is in the food that we need to be able to use that vitamin. So they measure vitamins and antioxidants but do not measure enzymes or other nutitive factors that are needed to be able to use the vitamins in our bodies, so I do not feel confident that frozen is better, even though that is the latest "research" going around. Also parrot studies of what they need to digest other things is really in its infacy. I will use frozen when thats all I have access too Parrots in the wild ate food on the plant but also food dropped to the ground, so that was natural, I feel safer going with what was natural as much as possible. For that reason I use fresh whenever possible, fresh whole foods. Frozen is fine to use though, I just choose fresh over it whenever I can. I was very sick and I went on a whole food vegan raw diet and got healthy again so I cant do less for my parrots than I do for myself. My Parrots and I eat vegan raw diet together. We only eat a very little cooked because some food has to be cooked to be good for them.

[seagoatdeb]

Chop can be as big or as small as you need it to be. I have just kept up with the lastest research and feed raw and fresh whenever possible. i am not against freezing. I also grow myself or buy local so mine is very fresh. This is the What I have been researching. I dont want to argue, I would just like to find out about new raw foods and new mixes for the highest nutrition. So I would appreciate comments from those feeding a raw diet.

http://www.omagdigital.com/article/The+ ... ticle.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZqbrZNImkk

Very interesting! The first one, at least, I couldn't understand a word of the video because I suffer from a mild form of nerve-end deafness and voices over a device or with background noise (both problems in this case) are unintelligible to me.

My parrots do eat raw every day but, where I live, it's impossible to source local. You do get the occasional few items during the summer and part of the fall but none are organic so I would still have to rely on frozen as it provides better nutrition that fresh. I wish he would give some sort of recipe though... I mean, I feed everything he mentions but I don't see myself feeding my parrots raw rice, to tell you the truth! One thing I don't completely agree with is his comment about parrots eating a lot of cellulose because, if one goes by their anatomy, one would have to deduct that they don't eat that much of it.

I hardly ever feed rice because of arsenic anyway...lol...but you aready now that. I am so sorry to hear you have the nerve end deafness. The video is one of the talks he gave. I did post the introduction from his book in the forum, some information on how to soak/sprout, and I did post some recipes. But in actuality, to feed raw natural foods, it would be much what is already in a gloop. The only thing you would really change is instead of cooking you would soak/sprout your grains, nuts and seeds. You can still freeze the mixture. i try not to freee myself but it is easy for me not to, If i am having sprouted buckwheat for breakfast, then that is the grain they will have. If I am making sprouted almond milk or sprouted pumpkin seed milk, they will have those sprouted seeds and nuts that day. i always have a mix of sprouted/soaked seeds on the go. It keeps up to three days I the fridge. That is what is easy for me because I eat whole food vegan raw. But it would be easier for most people to freeze a chop.

[Leanna]

The chop we make at the rescue is different every day. A lot depends on what we have, what needs to be used first, what I manage to grab before the bowl is filled up, etc.

I run the chop through a slicer on a food processor. It mixes things up well and gets juices on everything. It prevents some birds from just going through the bowl picking out their favorite things and tossing the rest.

I think the gloop I feed my own bird is about as mushy as the chop I give the rescue birds, but there is no fruit in the gloop, so I feel okay leaving it in the cage a bit longer. The chop at the rescue is pulled out after a few hours. Once they all get their chop, the cages get cleaned, the floors get done, and then the chop is pulled out. It usually takes about 3-4 hours.

Yes chop freezes well, I dont freeze fruit in my chop, I just take out the chop that was frozen and add fresh fruit to it and any other fresh vegetables I have on hand.

[Leanna]

Frozen fruit and veggies have more nutrition than produce that was picked, traveled and then put in the store.

I cant agree with this quote and I will give you my reasons:

1. All the research only found that on some foods freezing kept the vitamin and antioxidents higher, than fresh that had gotten old, but that is only part of the nutrition contained in every fruit and vegetable.

2. There is no study on the effects of long term feeding parrots frozen food.

3. The studies were done on food that was just frozen and not food that had stayed frozen for a long period of time.

I do use frozen, sometimes that is all thats available, but I do not think it is healthier and there is no study that supports that statement.

[Pajarita]

It seems to me that you are agreeing with what Liz said, actually, because she was not referring to parrot food but frozen versus fresh produce in general, and you do say that the studies did show that they were higher in vitamins and antioxidants, which is what she was saying, too.

For people who have not heard about these studies, these are two links that talk about the same studies but, if you put both articles together, you will find more complete information:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/artic ... dants.html

http://www.medicaldaily.com/when-frozen ... equivalent

[seagoatdeb]

It seems to me that you are agreeing with what Liz said, actually, because she was not referring to parrot food but frozen versus fresh produce in general, and you do say that the studies did show that they were higher in vitamins and antioxidants, which is what she was saying, too.

For people who have not heard about these studies, these are two links that talk about the same studies but, if you put both articles together, you will find more complete information:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/artic ... dants.html

http://www.medicaldaily.com/when-frozen ... equivalent

If you look at all the points Leanna put, she was not agreeing. She was saying they only looked at two of the healthy things in food, vitamins and antioxidants since there are more components to food, What else was lost? we know humans cant use vitamin c with out folate for example, so how many other nutrients have been removed by freezing that can make it less valuable for parrots?
She also said that the studies were done on fresh frozen food and not food that had been in a frost free fridge for weeks. So when does the freezing temp variation and length of time start degrading the food value? Leanna had very valid points. It will take research to provide those answers and Leanna has left, so she wont be answering.

[Navre]

It was posted above, or somewhere else, the gloop is cooked.

I have been cooking the pilaf, but then mixing all the other frozen and canned ingredients into the pilaf. There is so much frozen stuff that there is just about no way that the ingredients are cooked by the residual heat of the pilaf.

I then freeze the gloop in muffin tins and thaw at room temperature for use. (I use to microwave to thaw, but the vet advised against serving warm food)

Seems like most of my gloop is raw.

[Pajarita]

If you look at all the points Leanna put, she was not agreeing. She was saying they only looked at two of the healthy things in food, vitamins and antioxidants since there are more components to food, What else was lost? we know humans cant use vitamin c with out folate for example, so how many other nutrients have been removed by freezing that can make it less valuable for parrots?
She also said that the studies were done on fresh frozen food and not food that had been in a frost free fridge for weeks. So when does the freezing temp variation and length of time start degrading the food value? Leanna had very valid points. It will take research to provide those answers and Leanna has left, so she wont be answering.

Well, what do you feed produce to a parrot for? As far as I am concerned (and, please, let me know if I am missing something here), it's for vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, enzymes, fiber and, in much lesser degree, carbs but, of all of them, in my personal opinion, the vitamins/minerals and antioxidants are the most important. Now, you do lose some (not all) antioxidants with freezing but one should always feed fresh produce anyway. Fructose (the carbs) and fiber cells do suffer when frozen because of the expansion of ice crystals but the only thing freezing does is make the fruit and vegetable lose its integrity (when you thaw them, they are not as firm as they were before freeazing, they get mushy), it doesn't really change the content of fiber and sugar so the effect is nil when it comes to these elements of nutrition.

Minerals are fine with freezing and, as to what vitamins degrade and when, studies show that the only one that actually degrades is Vit C because it's affected by air and that the loss is up to 50% if kept in the freezer for a year (the normal 'usable' date of frozen produce) BUT fresh loses up to 75% in just one week after harvesting and, as fruits are picked when they are not ripe, shipped, ripen by gas (which takes a day or so) and then put on the 'fresh' produce on the supermarket, it takes about that long for them to get to you so even if you are using the produce the same day, it already lost more than a frozen one that you have kept in the freezer for months -which I never do, anyway, I buy the frozen veggies (I don't use fruit in the gloop) and use them the same or following day (mostly because I don't have enough room in the freezer for them).

Note: this is off the top of my head, I had the studies in my computer but I've been using my husband - but you can check it out yourself.

[seagoatdeb]

You can only do the best you can, so we all have to freeze. Leannas info wont change much of what I do, but the part where she mentioned the frost free freezers got me thinking, and researching and I will be more careful how long I leave food frozen.

[Navre]

We should move on to less controversial topics like: Should you spank your children? (Kidding)