Best Parrot Food for Nutrition

Sir Charles, White-eyed Conure, a rescue.

What is Malnutrition?

To get to the root cause of inappropriate parrot behaviors, we’ve got to talk about avian malnutrition. Let’s look at how malnutrition affects parrot behavior.

According to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, malnutrition is a common and detrimental condition that must be addressed quickly and comprehensively. Malnutrition is a physical state of unbalanced nutrition. It can mean undernutrition or over nutrition. When most people think of malnutrition, they often picture undernutrition, which derives from a lack of complete protein or a lack, or imbalance, in any of the hundreds of nutrients a bird must eat everyday.

Over-nutrition comes from eating too many calories, or when people use vitamin supplements containing vitamin A or D. See the article on this website:“Feeding Parrots: Over-Supplementation Malnutrition”. A bird can eat more calories than his body needs and still be malnourished at the same time. This occurs because the bird is not eating the proper combination of foods that provides the required balance between nutrients.

.

Nutrients, Malnutrition and Parrot Behavior

Fact: a parrot must eat hundreds of nutrients every day. See my ‘MUST EAT’ List here. When any of these essential nutrients are missing from a parrot’s diet they become stressed. Because they are not eating the proper balance of nutrients they instinctively may start acting out and become more aggressive. Loud screaming and biting are two examples of these types of behaviors. If you want to improve your parrot’s behaviors, you’ve got to feed him, or her, balanced nutrition.

Nutrient Inter-relationships and Balance

One example illustrating ‘the required balance between nutrients’ is the relationship between the essential minerals calcium and phosphorus. In the avian body calcium is the predominant mineral in the skeletal system. Calcium is also present in the body fluids where it plays an essential role in blood coagulation and membrane permeability (an essential quality of cell membranes, present in all cells, that allows certain molecules to pass through), while also maintaining normal functioning of the heart, muscles and nerves.

Vitamin D3 (the sunshine vitamin) regulates calcium absorption. And it relies on proper amounts of phosphorus being present and available for absorption. Other nutrients that play a role in calcium absorption are the macro-mineral magnesium, and the trace minerals iron, fluorine, zinc, iodine, manganese and copper. All these thousands of ‘nutritional inter-relationships’ must be in balance for preventing avian malnutrition.Calcium nourishes the nervous system and can provide a calming effect on a parrot’s behavior.

Feeding a Wide Variety of Foods

Giving your birds a wide variety of different foods is one sure way to know your parrots are not getting all the nutrients they need. This type of diet lacks nutritional balance. This mean the diet lacks essential nutrients and this will result in unbalanced avian nutrition. And this is the direct cause of avian malnutrition and undernutrition. In addition, avian malnutrition and undernutrition are what makes the birds you love sick, cuts their lives short and causes them to bite and have other ‘unfriendly’ behaviors.

Now that you know how malnutrition and unbalanced nutrition affects the behavior of your parrot, consider this. The foods you are feeding either support good behaviors or cause behavior issues.