by Malcolm Green

I have been asked to write a short article on ‘balanced diets’. I don’t even know if there is a formal definition but I will give you my informal one:

 When a balanced diet is consumed by a bird or animal that animal is able to maintain a healthy state of wellbeing through its natural life span.

 There are some key points to note about this. Firstly a balanced diet must be consumed and not just offered and secondly it must be complete enough for all the bird’s system to operate effectively and efficiently for as long as nature has designed them to.

 The reality is that the vast majority of pet (and even breeder) birds do not get a diet of this quality.

How precisely can we define a balanced diet?

 Nature is full of variation. Every day and every season provides wild animals with changes in the foods that are available to them. So clearly life has evolved to cope with this variation. So for most of the key nutrients in the diet there is no perfect quantity to be consumed. Each nutrient will have a range of quantities that are perfectly OK. If the animal eats more than it requires then its system simply gets rid of the excess. This applies to most nutrients but not all – see the discussion of energy below.

 In fact the safety range for nearly all nutrients is quite enormous.

 The concept of balance is important in this. Nutrients do not work in isolation – they interact with each other. Let me explain this with a human example. A well-known British actor was working in London in play that gave him lots of exercise. He was concerned about dehydration so forced himself to drink eight litres of water a day (I may have the detail wrong but it was a lot of water). He simply didn’t need this much water so his body removed it by making him urinate a lot in addition to the sweating the work was experiencing. With both sweat and urine we cannot stop salts being washed out with the water. In this case this caused the actors blood salt levels to drop. He dropped into a comma and nearly died!

 The moral of this story is that even the safest of nutrients can be dangerous if taken in excess. Fortunately a healthy bird is never going to drink excessively like this. But one with liver or kidney damage may do!

 What constitutes an excessive amount of a nutrient

 A bird only gets a toxic amount of a nutrient if its body is unable to excrete the excess. The most commonly quoted nutrients in this category are vitamins A and D. Excesses are stored in the liver. If intakes remain too high for prolonged periods of time the liver becomes ‘clogged’ and no longer functions properly. This is incredibly rare. We asked the UK’s top two bird vets how often they saw cases like this and their answers were that in over 50,000 patients they had seen two cases between them. And these were caused by people using non-bird supplements so not having the benefit of correct labelling advice! For what it is worth this type of overdose is immediately reversible by withdrawing the vitamins from the diet and no lasting damage is caused.

 More about balance

 The water example given above is an example of an unbalanced diet. One of the pellet manufacturers has recently been spreading scare stories about unbalanced vitamin supplements. Their argument is that if the diet has too much vitamin A relative to the amount of vitamin D in the diet the A is absorbed preferentially and blocks the absorption of vitamin D. They claim that this can lead to reduced calcium absorption and hence rickets, egg binding etc. However they do not present a single example of this actually happening – it remains totally theoretical. And why does it remain theoretical? Simply because supplements manufacturers and pellet manufacturers have access to the same research so use very similar A to D ratios in their products!

 But one balance issue is very important. That is the ratio between energy and protein in the diet. Over the years the tendency has been that we feed our pet and aviary birds diets similar to those of their wild cousins. I have frequently read how the nutritional profile of a sunflower seed is similar to that of a palm nut. This has routinely been used as the reason for feeding parrots like African greys on sunflower, nuts etc. Unfortunately this ignores the fact that wild African greys fly 50 miles a day whilst their pet cousins probably fly less than 50 metres! So it is clear that a wild bird needs far more energy than a pet bird. But the protein requirements of the two birds are still very similar so we should feed our birds diets with lower energy to protein ratios.

 Other foods that score poorly on energy to protein ratios are all cereal grains, fruits (yes fruits!) and vegetables that are storage organs such as potatoes, carrots etc. Leafy vegetables (including the much maligned lettuce) are far better as are animal proteins so long as they are separated from fats. So lean chicken is great, cheese is not.

 This is one area where pellets score well. Most pellets contain more protein relative to energy than seeds and nuts so birds eating diets with adequate pellet contents are unlikely to get ill from obesity. Sadly though research tells us that only about 2% of pet birds get this level of pellet in their diet even in the USA where pellets are supposed to rule. Of course they only actually have a small share of the pet (and breeder) market despite years of heavy promotion. It was this very poor level of compliance amongst birds and their owners that convinced us many years ago that pellets were not the way forward and we chose to stop selling them.

 Actually shifting the energy to protein ratio of a diet is very easy with supplements. I don’t have room to explain in this article but I would refer you to our web site. For Europeans here is the link:

http://www.birdcareco.com/English/Arts/Bckgrnd/Protein_qual/protein.html

For people living outside Europe we have the same article in the USA section:

http://www.birdcareco.com/USA/USAArticles_and_advice/US_Health_Articles/USProtQual/usprotqual.html

 It is my belief that it is easier to get a bird to consume a couple of pinches a day of supplement than it is to get it to make pellets 80% of the diet. Having said that, even we have compliance problems with people who insist on giving a daily supplement once a week!!!

 But the supplement must be one that contains adequate quantities of the two key limiting amino acids (lysine and methionine0 to achieve the balance required. In The Birdcare Company portfolio this means Daily Essentials3, BirdPark Essentials or our Feast soft foods. Water soluble products will not be able to achieve the desired effect.

 It is impossible to overstate this issue. Obesity is probably the most common cause of premature death in cage and aviary birds. Most owners do not recognise the problem. By the time the liver and heart is damaged by the unbalanced diet the bird has lost a lot of weight (liver failure will cause weight loss) and it is very difficult to persuade owners that their bird used to be obese.

 Innate nutritional wisdom

 Pellet manufacturers will argue that the risk of obesity is a strong argument for using their products. Our experience is very different. What we have discovered is, with a few exceptions of birds who have completely fixated on single food sources, that if we offer birds a choice of high and low protein foods they actually select the right balance for their particular needs. This has been confirmed by European research on racing pigeons.

 In particular breeding birds respond to higher protein availability from the diet by coming into breeding condition. They then consume much higher levels of protein when their chicks are growing fastest and these levels drop as they mature. By offering a varied diet (suitably supplemented) adult birds are able to feed exactly the right balance for their babies on any particular day. They can’t do that with pellets and you can’t do it with a hand rearing formula!

 There are certain nutrients this strongly applies to. They are protein, energy (you feel hungry when blood energy levels drop, water (you feel thirsty when blood water levels drop) and calcium (birds voluntarily eat more calcium if it is offered prior to and during egg production). There may be other nutrients that birds can control their needs for but this is not an area that has attracted much research.

 Bio availability

 If you dig hard enough through the Internet you will find recommended levels of all sorts of nutrients. Unfortunately these can be misleading too – especially for minerals. Interestingly many wild birds do very well on much lower mineral intakes than we generally give to aviary birds. This is because the minerals they consume from fresh foods are far more easily absorbed than those from dry seeds and the cereals, beans etc used to make pellets.

 What matters is not what is put into the gut but what gets from the gut into the bloodstream. The recommended levels of nutrients for bird and animal feeds are all estimated using ‘traditional’ additives like calcium carbonate and magnesium sulphate. These are difficult to absorb.

 Modern supplements contain chelated minerals that more closely mimic natural mineral sources. These are absorbed far more readily. So these products achieve the same or better performance with much lower levels of supplementation. Unfortunately it makes it virtually impossible for the layman to estimate the potency of a product from the information presented on the label.

 Without doubt the most important nutrient affected by bio-availability is calcium. Surveys tell us that nearly all pet birds get less than the recommended levels of calcium in their diet. This explains why calcium deficiency symptoms are present in about 70% of the cases referred to our BirdVet Online service. These include poor nerve and muscle function (from poor flying to potentially fatal fits and seizures), reduced egg laying and poor shell quality and behavioural problems like fear, aggression and self mutilation. We believe there is a link between calcium deficiency and respiratory infections.

 Calcium is certainly a prime example of a nutrient where supplement quality is far more important than quantity. We provide far less then the generally recognised RDA of calcium yet get outstanding results.

 Immune support

 While obesity is a disease of excess that leads to organ damage many birds suffer poor immune function as a result of simple vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Supplements easily plug these nutrient gaps in the diet.

 However modern supplements can do even better. These day we also use additives that are not absolutely essential for life (as vitamins are) but that have a very positive effect on health and wellbeing. These are called nutricines. Many of these are found in quite low levels in grains and cereals - and hence in pellets too. We incorporate many of these into our routine products and some very special ones into products to help sick birds.

 Digestive system support

 In a similar way we can help the digestive system. Adding selected nutricines to supplements improves the gut environment for beneficial bacteria. This is called a prebiotic effect. This reduces the need for probiotics though they still have real benefits for breeding birds and dealing with specific digestive upsets.

 These ingredients are not essential but they do have a significant impact on general health and chick health in particular. I regard them as an important part of a balanced diet.

 Summary

 These days it is very easy to provide pet and breeding birds with ‘balanced diets’ or more correctly diets from which they can control their own requirements. All that is needed is a variety of high and low energy to protein ratio foods suitably supplemented to ensure adequate vitamins, trace minerals and amino acids. The basic foods to use will vary by species – most species will eat seed and/or nuts as part of the diet. Macaws, conures and eclectus will readily eat fresh fruits and veggies, greys and cockatoos may prefer veggies to fruits. Dealing with seed junkies may require more determination and we are happy to give some advice or offer our special supplement – Fussy feeder Essentials.

 At The Birdcare Company we are happy to provide advice on basic diets and supplementation for your birds. Please just get in touch by phone or e-mail or talk to one of our retailers around the world.

 www.BirdcareCo.com

mailto:advice@BirdcareCo.com

Tel (UK): 0845 130 8600 (local call charge from UK landlines)

Tel (Int): +44 1453 835330

Fax: +44 (0)1453 834302