Elevated Bile Acids

[pfinarffle]

Anyone's bird have these come up in their labs? It can mean any number of things. I was hoping to gain some insights into what we should do with our guy. We have an almost 20 year-old Senegal parrot whom we adopted 3 years ago. When we got him, his labs were pretty bad. His bile acids were elevated and he had budding yeast in his GI tract. Vet prescribed some Baytril, gave us a liquid liver supplement for him (B vitamins + silymarin), and several weeks later, voila! No more yeast or elevated bile acids! We also worked on his diet, introducing sprouts and trying to get him to eat veggies etc though that's a losing battle 99.999% of the time. At any rate, two years later his routine labs again showed elevated bile acids though no budding yeast. I don't recall how much more elevated the acids were, but not hugely elevated. Same cycle of Baytril and liver supplement, and 2 weeks later voila! Bile acids down again. I'm thinking this might just be his crappy diet. He will literally fly after us when he sees us eating something relatively bad for him (eg, meats, breads, dairy etc), but when we eat veggies in front him I kid you not he literally flies away. It's just like a flying toddler-- a 20 year-old flying toddler whose prior owners never taught him how to eat well! Other than the obvious task of working with him on bettering his diet, what more do you folks think we should do with this situation? Should we keep giving him liver supplement meds of some sort? Vitamins? I give him one of those avian probiotics like once a week in his water to help with the yeast situation to make sure that doesn't come back, and so far so good! Thanks in advance!

[Grey_Moon]

Hmm...well I'm always for treating holistically and naturally rather than synthetic meds and my girl is older and fussy too but here's what I would do

-Stop free-feeding him and offer him breakfast and dinner (you'll see they get muuuch less fussy when they've had a bit of time to consider it and get hungry) this has helped me with Jacko a TON.

-At this point, the important thing is to offer him veggies in a way that he will eat and to sneak in the less tasty stuff. For Jacko this meant offering it all blended and mashed together into a weird sort of loaf/pie with whole egg and plenty of banana mush and orange juice to make it sweet and mask the yucky stuff. The result? She's gobbling sweet potato, broccoli, kale, arugula, bok choy and all the good stuff and she doesn't even notice it. If your little guy likes eggs etc use it to your advantage.

-As far as the silymarin (which is the active compound in milk thistle) I would not give it to him long term just in case. I learned via Shauna Roberts over on FeedingFeathers that giving it long-term is thought to cause the liver values to become abnormal over time according to some herbalists.

-Diet supplement-wise I would give him plenty of dandelion and alfalfa (good purifiers especially for the liver with dandelion) and add in some probiotics and some chamomile tea or cinnamon (anti-yeast). Personally I'm against feeding artificial diets like pellets and the like but thats up to you. I believe we can accomplish a lot of healing through food.

-I'd scrap anything being put in his water due to the fact that many products in water either dissolve and lose their potency and/or foul the water making it dirty and becoming an infection risk.

I think if you tailor his diet to be more low-carb-ish (to watch for yeast) and full of greens he'll perk up---he'll be stubborn sure, but any animal can learn to eat well given the time

Good luck