Too many hot peppers?

[Laurie Feldman]

5 month old Senegal Mimi is crazy for her fresh vegetables and that's great by me. She REALLY loves fresh hot red peppers. We have a plant in the garden and she can eat a lot of them every day. I asked the breeder if there was any danger in this, and he said that, no, they regulate themselves. But I'm curious if people here have another opinion about this. I know they're very good for her, but am worried about quantity.

[Pajarita]

I would not give them to her all the time and I'll tell you why. Hot peppers are not bad for them per se. As a matter of fact, there are very good things about them and they all have to do with capsaicin, the chemical that makes peppers 'hot'. I am talking digestion, gut flora, circulatory, metabolism, immune system, etc. And, because parrots don't have that many taste buds and they are all located on the top and back of their throat, they don't suffer the burning sensation as badly as we do. Having said that, I don't believe that a lot of a good thing is better. I believe in feeding them a large range of produce - the wider the selection they eat from, they better it will be for them so although hot peppers are good for them, there are many other things that are as good and many other things they should be eating. But parrots are seasonal eaters so giving them a bit more of one thing for a small period of time is exactly the way they eat in the wild, ergo, personally, I would give her more of the fresh peppers (three times a week?) simply beause they are in season but I would not give them to her all the time, either.
Because it's not that they self-regulate, like the breeder said, it's that, in the wild, as the seasons come and go and different food sources become available at different times, at the end, they end up eating everything they should so it's not really self-regulation (if this was true, no parrot would suffer from hepatic lipidosis but they all do if we don't watch their diet carefully), it's evolution that fine-tuned their dietary needs to their natural habitat sources.

[Laurie Feldman]

Thank you. We generally eat fruit and vegetables seasonally ourselves in Italy, so what I have on hand for Mimi (other than frozen peas at the moment) is in season. Much of it is organic. I was worried about the peppers, having read in another place that too much is bad for the gut. This week she's had Tuscan yellow beans, green beans, small green sweet peppers, fresh hot red peppers, carrots, granny smith apples (the only kind You-You eats, so we have those in the kitchen), carob beans, broccoli, peas, and hazelnuts. And she gets Versele Laga mix for African birds, but only eats a bite or two of that every day. She wants fresh food. You-You lived for months in a store where he was given a very poor diet, as far as fresh foods go, and will ONLY eat carrots and apples, and his dry Versele Laga mix. He was given a lot of table scraps, including things very bad for him, like mozzarella cheese and prosciutto. He won't even TRY any of the good things Mimi eats. We were hoping she'd be a good influence.

[Pajarita]

Well, in my personal experience -and I have quite a bit of it because all my birds came to me as adults and the greatest majority as seed junkies like your YouYou- the only way to get them to eat a good fresh food diet is to restrict their protein food to dinner (it's also the only way they stay healthy because parrots are hard-wired to eat as much protein as possible whenever found so they always end up eating too much of that and too little of the fresh food). Try making a simple gloop and putting it out for breakfast as well as fresh produce instead of the seed mix and he will start eating it in a couple of days (they all do). Now, I don't know if this is the case with you but most people think that fresh produce is better than frozen and, in reality, it's exactly the opposite. Frozen is more nutritious than fresh. They still need fresh raw produce because of the phytonutrients in them (especially the enzymes they need for a healthy intestinal flora) but in terms of vitamin value, frozen is better.

I don't know if you feed the African Gray or the African Parakeet mix but I checked the ingredients and both have soy and artificial colors with the African Gray one having sunflowers as the first ingredient (a no-no with any species of parrot) and raw peanuts (another no-no) so I hope this is not the one you are feeding. You would do better with a better seed mix, one that has nothing but seeds in it (and just a couple of sunflowers with no peanuts in it) and giving them a multivitamin/mineral supplement two or three times a week.