Feeding Natural Parrot Diet Enzymes Parrots cant produce.

[seagoatdeb]

I came across information from Raw Food Diet author Machelle Pacion, and whose early carreer focused on nutrition for curing plucking in parrots, about the danger of feeding food high in Cellulose and it will be easy for me to keep grains low as i already do, and I can decrease the veggies high in it broccoli, cabbage, brussel sprouts, collard greens, kale, cauliflower very easily. Its a very short article so please read and give your input as we are all looking for the best diets for our pois. here is a small quote from it with the main point of why our parrots can digest cellulose from the artice.

"with cellulose it plain doesn’t get broken down at all, ever except in the case when it passes through the “cecum”, which mammals have. However, birds are not mammals, they are aves. Parrots belong to a very special class of aves that do not have ceca. Poultry have ceca, parrots do not. The cecum is a small, blind-ended sac connecting the small and large stomach."

http://exoticbirdclubonline.com/2015/11 ... llulase-2/

[Pajarita]

This lady is very good at presenting information in such a way that, although it is not completely inaccurate, it is half of the story. Yes, cellulose is indigestible to all but ruminants but it's not only excellent fiber (necessary for good digestion), it's also found in every single plant material and the ones that have the higher levels are super nutritious ones like sweet potatoes, carrots, pumpkin, broccoli, etc. So, taking into consideration that a parrot natural diet consists in its entirety of food that has cellulose (plant material) and that the alternative to reducing high cellulose food would be to supplement the vitamins and minerals it naturally contains with man-made ones, I would say that it's better to feed it to them than not to.

[seagoatdeb]

i think it is a good point that their diets did not consist of high cellulose, and finding as close to a natural diet for our parrots as we can is what i am striving for so, i am going to do as much research on this topic as i can. Until then i will just lower the amount of cellulose. i was really interested in how Parrots belong to a very special class of aves that do not have ceca, and I am very interested in more research and more info about this, since it may make it very hard for our parrots bodies to deal with cellulose. Our human bodies use it for fiber and we are meat eaters and need fiber, but there bodies are not like ours that way, and the point she made was that fiber flushed nutrients out of their body, so i really think this needs to be looked at.

[Pajarita]

Well, let's not confuse things. Parrots don't have a cecum (although some species have vestigial ones) for the simple reason that their diet is mainly seeds/grains, nuts and fruits but that doesn't mean that their diet has to be low in cellulose because everything they eat in the wild is made of it. It just means that they don't need to break it down the way that ruminants do. Humans have ceca but we don't really break-down cellulose, either, we use it as fiber which is what parrots do, too.

[seagoatdeb]

Well, let's not confuse things. Parrots don't have a cecum (although some species have vestigial ones) for the simple reason that their diet is mainly seeds/grains, nuts and fruits but that doesn't mean that their diet has to be low in cellulose because everything they eat in the wild is made of it. It just means that they don't need to break it down the way that ruminants do. Humans have ceca but we don't really break-down cellulose, either, we use it as fiber which is what parrots do, too.

I was the most interested in this paragraph and if you have the research to either prove that parrots use fiber the same as us, or to disprove what Machelle says. i will also keep researching myself.

"Ceca pulverize and liquefy cellulose into a liquid that is then reabsorbed into the metabolic system to be used as glucose. (1) For birds that do not have a cecum, and because birds do not produce cellulase to break down cellulose, this tough indigestible fiber only acts as a laxative stripping the delicate mucus lining from the digestive tract, as well as nutrients as the cellulose passes through. Because birds have a very short and narrow digestive tract compared to most mammals having a broad and long digestive tract, they do not need a fibrous laxative like cellulose to thoroughly cleanse their digestive tract. Instead Nature has provided “pectin” and “hemicellulose” fibers in their indigenous foods such as tropical fruit and tender greens, also containing Omega 3s to gently flush their digestive tracts while delivering vital nutrients. Both of these fibers are soluble fibers whereas cellulose is insoluble."

[Wolf]

But, as I understand it, it is the non digestible fiber that serves as the binding agent for most of the toxic elements that our birds do eat and in the case of caged birds this is important in reducing the incidence of heavy metal poisoning among other things. Perhaps I have misunderstood this, but it is what my current understanding of it is. So far as I am aware all living creatures require both soluble and insoluble fiber to properly maintain their digestive tract. I am not really sure how much of either of these is optimal for them at this time.

[Pajarita]

Well, let's not confuse things. Parrots don't have a cecum (although some species have vestigial ones) for the simple reason that their diet is mainly seeds/grains, nuts and fruits but that doesn't mean that their diet has to be low in cellulose because everything they eat in the wild is made of it. It just means that they don't need to break it down the way that ruminants do. Humans have ceca but we don't really break-down cellulose, either, we use it as fiber which is what parrots do, too.

I was the most interested in this paragraph and if you have the research to either prove that parrots use fiber the same as us, or to disprove what Machelle says. i will also keep researching myself.

"Ceca pulverize and liquefy cellulose into a liquid that is then reabsorbed into the metabolic system to be used as glucose. (1) For birds that do not have a cecum, and because birds do not produce cellulase to break down cellulose, this tough indigestible fiber only acts as a laxative stripping the delicate mucus lining from the digestive tract, as well as nutrients as the cellulose passes through. Because birds have a very short and narrow digestive tract compared to most mammals having a broad and long digestive tract, they do not need a fibrous laxative like cellulose to thoroughly cleanse their digestive tract. Instead Nature has provided “pectin” and “hemicellulose” fibers in their indigenous foods such as tropical fruit and tender greens, also containing Omega 3s to gently flush their digestive tracts while delivering vital nutrients. Both of these fibers are soluble fibers whereas cellulose is insoluble."

I would be interested in a link that proves this paragraph, especially the 'stripping the delicate mucus lining form the digestive tract' in birds. I looked and looked and looked for something online that would support this but the only links I found were ALL about psyllium supplements - there wasn't a single reference anywhere to this happening by eating any kind of food high in fiber. And I don't see how something that they evolved to eat and have been eating for thousands and thousands of years can be that harmful to them.

As to whether they utilize fiber the same way we do, well, as you know, there are million of chicken studies (no good because they are omnivores) but almost nothing with parrots but we do know that bird's small intestine is very similar to ours, that they cannot use psyllium (a type of hemicellulose and the most common source of fiber in pellets) the same way we do, that the lack of ceca is due to the type of diet they have and that the rule of thumb is that, when there is no ceca, a longer and/or wider intestine is found AND we also know that the digestive tract organs actually adjust their size according to the diet the animal receives.

A few links that deal with avian digestion and the points I mention above for your perusal:
http://www.thewonderofbirds.com/biology/caeca.htm
http://www.jarvm.com/articles/Vol1Iss2/Bavelaar.htm
http://www.roebuckbay.org.au/wp-content ... ctions.pdf
http://www.thewonderofbirds.com/biology ... /canal.htm (notice on this one the extra long digestive tract of the ostrich which has a diet very similar to parrots)
http://people.eku.edu/ritchisong/birddigestion.html
http://www.vivo.colostate.edu/hbooks/pa ... ion/birds/
http://www.jarvm.com/articles/Vol1Iss2/Bavelaar.htm
http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs ... 1rK94-cFMs

[seagoatdeb]

Great job on finding all the articles, but there really is not enough done on parrots, i really hope there will be more studies done in the future.

All you are saying is sensible to me, but I dont agree with one sentence..."

And I don't see how something that they evolved to eat and have been eating for thousands and thousands of years can be that harmful to them."

I dont see this statement as very relevant, since it is very rare that someone is feeding their parrot the same foods they ate in the wild. We are feeding only what we can get where we live most of the time and "NOT" their natural diet. This is the very point that makes me want to keep improving my parrrots diet and look at more information. Right?

[Pajarita]

Well, no, actually, it is very relevant because I wasn't talking about any specific plant or food item, I was talking about cellulose which is found in every single plant on earth and which they consume in the wild all the time.

I actually kept on looking and looking for a single study or even reference about cellulose or any other insoluble fiber been harmful to the intestinal mucosa and/or stripping the mucus out of the lining of the intestines and found nothing, zilch, nada! As a matter of fact, everything I found says the complete opposite: that insoluble fiber is essential to good digestion and that, actually, an excess of mucus in the intestines is not desirable at all - so much so that there are pills and herbs recommended for stripping it! So, if you belong to her group, please ask her for back-up on this statement because her entire premise is based on it.

Furthermore, the one symptom that is ALWAYS mentioned when talking about consuming an excess of insoluble fiber by people with intestinal conditions like IBS, UC, etc (they never mention this for healthy people) is more gas than normal and this is something very easy to determine if it's happening to parrots or not and which, in my personal experience and based on all I have read, only happens when they have lower digestive tract infection.

More links:

http://www.livestrong.com/article/47350 ... -the-body/
http://thebreathoflife.net/learningcent ... intestine/
http://www.livestrong.com/article/51889 ... nal-mucus/
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/804450

[seagoatdeb]

You have me confused, are you talking about humans here? Where does it say parrots have mucus they need to clear out? They dont eat milk products, or other mucus forming foods.
The main point was that humans need a fairly high cellulose diet but parrots need a low one because parrots dont have Ceca. Parrots natural diets are low in cellulose.

Of course parrots in the wild will eat whatever they can find, and life in the wild can be hard in years that food is scarce. I have seen native birds eat white bread crumbs fed to them by people at Beacon Hill Park in Victoria for years, and the birds will even get agressive to get that white bread, but it is not good for any of those birds to have a diet high in bread crumbs, but they still eat them and look healthy, and all birds are like that they will eat things bad for them, and wont show sypmptoms untill they are very ill.

With a parrots native diet, they have been eating the same things for thousands of years. Any who ate wrong food would not reproduce as much as they would die younger, so after thousands of years the parrots left are the ones that are teaching their young to eat good foods. You will not see much changes with the addition of human crops to areas, because not enough time had gone by to see long term results. Also, in times of famine for parrots, humans could irrigate their crops giving parrots something to eat, so they would be temporarily more healthy since they might have been starving, but that doesnt tell you the long term affects either, becasue it would skew results of long term health. In areas that crops are heavily sprayed with round up, or other posions, the affect of the poisons would not be good in the long run. Wheat especially is sprayed with round up just before harvest as it increases yield by killing all the insects who eat the grain. So unless you can find organic ancient wheat, it is the worst for us and for parrots too, because it has been bred to have a lot more gluten, which is hard for any animal to digest, and it has a lot of poison in it.