Fat vs. protein

[Wolf]

Thank you. I was confused as the term appeared to be a non sequitur, that is that the term itself makes no sense.

[tielfan]

It's a common expression that means extreme excess. For example here's a Washington Post article that uses it in the title:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... story.html

There's even a band with that name: https://wretchedexcess.bandcamp.com/ I'm afraid to listen to their music clips lol.

[Wolf]

Funny thing about common expressions, they are only common in certain areas and never take hold in other areas. Wretched is usualy defined as miserable, woeful, grievous, despicable or inferior and so does not normally go well with excess sort of like governmental fiscal transparency or balanced budget to mention a couple of things that make no sense although mine are because we know that they will not occur.

However, I am not picky, I just needed a definition so as to know how to relate to the term. I now have that, I'm happy with that.

[Pajarita]

The thing is that you can't compare human nutrition and parrot nutrition, especially when it comes to BV. It's mostly a mammalian factor and, more specifically, an omnivore thing because it has to do with the quality of protein (whether it's 'complete' or not, etc) which is completely different for herbivore species (if this was applicable to all species, the koalas would have become extinct).

This quote from Wikipedia:

"The BV of a food varies greatly, and depends on a wide variety of factors. In particular the BV value of a food varies depending on its preparation and the recent diet of the organism. This makes reliable determination of BV difficult and of limited use — fasting prior to testing is universally required in order to ascertain reliable figures.

BV is commonly used in nutrition science in many mammalian organisms, and is a relevant measure in humans.[1] It is a popular guideline in bodybuilding in protein choice"

The point is that the concept and values in all the links are human, not avian or of any other species, for that matter.

See this on ruminants:
http://www.livestocklibrary.com.au/bits ... sequence=1

See this on large and small generalist herbivores:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 837.x/full

Even studies done on chickens (the only avian species that seems to be of interest to researchers but that we can't really use 100% because of the huge differences between chickens and parrots dietary ecology) are not as useful as one would want them to be. See this:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/su ... 1.498.1875

So, in reality, we do not know exactly what constitutes 'complete' protein to the different avian species, what the biological value of the different sources of vegetarian protein in the wild (seeds and nuts) are for them or how much protein a wild bird versus a captive bird needs, etc. because there is no psittacine data. If we go by the data we do have (humans, rats, etc), we know that the protein that is not used for energy,muscle development or any other biological function ends up been transformed into fat through transamination (http://www.livestrong.com/article/52204 ... -body-fat/), we know that protein has a role in transforming carbs into fat (http://www.unisci.com/stories/20013/0731014.htm), we also know that captive birds couldn't possibly require as much protein as wild birds and that, apparently, even though excess fat is first stored in tissue, it does end up been stored in the liver (and here is the link for the cardiovascular/cholesterol, etc link that I always mention and was questioned - this is human data but there is no avian whatsoever so it's pretty much all we have to go by) http://www.sciencecodex.com/fat_in_the_ ... sease_risk

This is another link between protein-fat-gonadal growth study specific to birds (but not parrots): http://www.jstor.org/stable/55686?seq=1 ... b_contents

Personally, although I eat very little protein (I hardly eat any meat to the point that I have chronic B12 deficiency), I do consume large amounts of carbs (mostly complex but some simple, too) as well as very adequate amounts of fiber and, on the few occasions that I have increased protein consumption in an effort to lose a bit of weight for some occasion or another, I ended up gaining weight!

[JessiMuse]

Honestly, I'm not a fan of getting information off of wikipedia. Unless if you already knew a lot about the topic beforehand, everything on it can be wrong and you won't even know it. Not to mention that people can edit them, and sometimes they'll put wrong information on purpose to screw people up.

If you couldn't find anything about it in more reliable sources and use Wiki as a last resort then I understand, but if anything, it would be good to try and find such information on something more credible.

[tielfan]

Wikipedia gets dissed a lot on the internet, but I find that it's actually right most of the time. It's often a good way to "get your feet wet" with a new subject, since hearing some of the basics makes you better equipped to pursue the subject on more specialized websites. You can find crap information on ANY website and a lot of stuff that passes as a scientific paper is of pretty low quality, so you always have to have your BS detector turned on no matter what you're reading. It's always helpful to compare information from several different websites and give it a sniff test to see whether it matches up with what you know about reality. I wouldn't use Wikipedia as the ONLY source unless I'm taking the lazy person's "this might or might not be right" approach, but it's a useful resource when it's used as part of a larger information search.

When you're dealing with a controversial issue or one where there's conflicting evidence, it's good to read both sides as open-mindedly as you can and then check out some of the claims to see which one seems to be closest to reality. I actively look to see if I can find reliable-looking websites that disagree with what I think is correct. There are lots of situations where we can't be 100% sure of the answer, but we can see the direction that the preponderance of the evidence is pointing in.

[JessiMuse]

I guess you're right. I'm just so used to teachers and professors failing people if they have wiki listed as one of their sources.

I'll read them when I get the chance.

[tielfan]

I can understand why professors wouldn't want to see Wikipedia in a college paper. But Wikipedia articles usually have a bunch of references at the bottom. If you can get hold of the original sources and read them, you've got something more respectable that you can list as a reference.

Here's a fun example of how the protein content of a food influences the total calories. Let's ignore biological value and go with the full potential calories. Here's our 100 grams of sunflower seed again, using NutritionData's calorie figures since their calculation algorithm is more sophisticated than mine.

Carbs: 20.0g, 81.1 calories
Fat: 51.5g, 431 calories
Protein: 20.8g, 72.1 calories
Fiber, minerals and moisture: 7.7g, 0 calories
Total: 100g, 584 calories

What would you say makes the most obvious contribution to obesity-related illness? If you say "the protein" then I say "interesting choice", but OK, let's wave our magic wand and make 10 grams of that nasty stuff disappear. Here's what we have left:

Carbs: 20.0g, 81.1 calories
Fat: 51.5g, 431 calories
Protein: 10.8g, 37.4 calories
Fiber, minerals and moisture: 7.7g, 0 calories
Total: 90g, 549.5 calories

Now divide everything by .9 so we can see how 100 grams of our new lower-protein sunflower seed compares to 100 grams of the original sunflower.

Carbs: 22.2g, 90.1 calories
Fat: 57.2g, 478.9 calories
Protein: 12.0g, 41.6 calories
Fiber, minerals and moisture: 8.6g, 0 calories
Total: 100g, 611 calories

Well dang. The total calories went up when we took out half the protein. Plus the complete protein to calories ratio for this food wasn't great to begin with and it just got worse.

The components in a specific food always have to add up to 100%, and when there's less protein there has to be more of something else. In general, grains, seeds, nuts don't have a whole lot of difference in their fiber mineral and moisture content, so most of the "something else" will probably be fat and/or carbs, which are higher in calories than the protein is.

[Wolf]

All of this is interesting to me, others would skip over this as they find it boring or just don't understand it. These calculations work for a single food item and to a large degree probably work fine with multiple food items as well, but we are getting technical, but once again we don't actually know that it applies to parrots in the same way that it does to humans. We can see, especially when looking at other species of animals other than parrots, that we do understand better that it should work out roughly the same way and then we expect it to. But then we start looking at the parrot species and what we are finding more and more is that what we learn nutritionally that works in one parrot species may not work with another, even when they are both from the same areas with exactly the same foods available to them. It would appear that parrots are far more highly specialized than we ever knew or dreamed that they are.. We know that depending on what the body is in need of that the absorption rates vary dramatically, this changes the composition of the chemical soup that the food is converted into and from which we glean our nutrition from. We know that the levels of vitamins and minerals , to be basic, have interactions that we don't yet fully understand but that one item will enhance the actions of other s and that another one will impede the actions of the others or al least some of them. But we do not know to what degree that it has these effect in the bodies of our parrots. This has the effect, whether we like it or not, of when we get technical and try to figure things out in a very detailed manner to be little more than a best guess scenario.

This does not mean that we are totally wrong about any of this because we do know that when parrots receive too much protein, fat and or carbohydrates that some of it is stored in the liver in fatty nodes and that if they get these same levels of these things that it will gradually build up and destroy the liver, We know this. What is being argued is which one may or may not be the largest contributor to this. We do not yet know how it all works together, it could be that when these thing all do some of the same functions that regardless of which is the most abundant in the food source, that the body uses it in accordance to which one works the best for a particular application resulting in the possibility that despite being the most abundant it is contributing less to the formation of the fatty nodes that say the one that is the least abundant. But we don't know this, yet and for now that is the true value of all of the detailed values and their therorized interactions.

Slightly off topic, because I was reminded of it with teilfans continued use of sunflower seeds in her calculations, it is something that has been nagging at my mind for some time but keeps getting lost in the shuffle. We all feed seeds to our parrots to some degree and while we do have the analysis for al of these seeds in their dried and mature form, but these seeds are not of any real value to the parrot in its natural environment as they don't usually eat either dry or mature seeds they eat mostly the immature, green seeds and yet we have no idea of those values. Even if we discount the moisture content the nutritional differences between the mature and immature seeds could be negligible or they could be completely different. Shouldn't we have at least some idea of these values.

Maybe I am off the wall about this last item, but due to where I live I do harvest a lot of immature grass type seeds that I feed to my birds.

Anyway our debates may not solve the parrots of the world's problems but they still cause us to do more research and improve our understandings as well as pose new questions in our minds that require answers. I am not intending to discount any of the information that has been presented in any manner, but I do think that we do need some grounding on occassion so that we don't lose sight of all of the people that are less technically inclined that are searching for the same answers in an easier to understand format.

[tielfan]

A study on the diet of wild zebra finches found that green seed contained more lysine than mature seed, which improved the protein quality: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... x/abstract We aim for a similar effect by combining beans with grains, since beans have some "extra' lysine that can match up with the "extra" methionine in the seeds. Apparently wild birds want more protein not less. This study considered only the protein levels not the other nutrients in the seed so we don't know what else they might have been getting out of it, and I'm not aware of any other studies on green seed.

What we've been trying to do all along is determine whether the statement that protein causes fatty liver disease and an assortment of other problems is correct or not. I don't see how we can intelligently discuss a question like this without getting into some technical issues. In this thread I provided info about calories in general and protein calories in particular in response to your concern that I was being too quick to dismiss the protein calories. At the end of this presentation, I still have to conclude that the protein calories just aren't as significant as the fat/carb calories, and reducing the amount of protein in the food doesn't solve the calorie problems.

At this point I'm still the only person in this long, long discussion who has provided any evidence on the issue at all, and all the evidence I've been able to find still points in the direction of protein not being a factor in causing fatty liver disease, obesity, high cholesterol, cardiovascular disease, high hormone levels, and aggression. If anything, it looks having a moderately higher percentage of protein in the same volume of food might be helpful in preventing or reducing the first four, by lowering the total calories in the diet and helping to improve liver function. Due to the nature of the "packaging" that plant proteins come in, you can't overfeed plant protein without overfeeding fats/carbs too, and those are expected to get you in trouble a lot faster than the protein will.

I'm still waiting to hear what Dr Echols has to say about it. He's out of town and not expected back until Sunday night, so that would probably be the earliest that we might hear from him.