Purina Sinking Catfish Food 50 lbs INGREDIENTS

[kdrun76]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Hikari+massivore+ingredients



Hikari massivore delite ingredients:

Ingredients: Fish meal, krill meal, starch, fish oil, wheat flour, dried seaweed meal, spirulina, brewer's dried yeast, dried Aspergillus niger fermentation extract, astaxanthin, canthaxanthin, DL-methionine, L-lysine, Vitamin A oil, Vitamin D3 supplement, Vitamin E supplement, menadione sodium bisulfite complex (source of Vitamin K), choline chloride, L-ascorbyl-2-polyphosphate (stabilized Vitamin C), inositol, calcium pantothenate, riboflavin, thiamine mononitrate, pyridoxine hydrochloride, niacin, folic acid, biotin, vitamin B12 supplement, ferrous sulfate, magnesium sulfate, zinc sulfate, manganese sulfate, cobalt sulfate, copper sulfate calcium iodate.

 

[Satan's Goldfish]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Hikari+massivore+ingredients



Hikari massivore delite ingredients:

Ingredients: Fish meal, krill meal, starch, fish oil, wheat flour, dried seaweed meal, spirulina, brewer's dried yeast, dried Aspergillus niger fermentation extract, astaxanthin, canthaxanthin, DL-methionine, L-lysine, Vitamin A oil, Vitamin D3 supplement, Vitamin E supplement, menadione sodium bisulfite complex (source of Vitamin K), choline chloride, L-ascorbyl-2-polyphosphate (stabilized Vitamin C), inositol, calcium pantothenate, riboflavin, thiamine mononitrate, pyridoxine hydrochloride, niacin, folic acid, biotin, vitamin B12 supplement, ferrous sulfate, magnesium sulfate, zinc sulfate, manganese sulfate, cobalt sulfate, copper sulfate calcium iodate.

that was quick!

i'd better print off and start comparing i suppose

 

[CHOMPERS]

That's Hikari cichlid.

LOL. Yep, the love of MFK. It's not very pretty when you look at it from a garbage perspective.

...I don't feed my fish garbage and and industrial waste. I know better.

I'm confused, you've never given your fish packaged fish food? Is there something better/more expensive than Hikari? Why haven't you written a sticky on fish food/recipes?

For what it's worth, human food is just as bad when you look at it from the "garbage perspective" too. I'll bet your fish eat better than you, right?

 

[Citrinellus]

Ugh, I feel like burning my hikari products now. I can't believe I spent so much for massivore only to have that in it. kdrun can you share what commercial brand of food you use if any?

 

[kdrun76]

Almost Natural is really expensive, but really good stuff. I know the maker of it well, he and I have shared a few recipes (and beers) back and forth.

Mostly I feed whole foods, not processed. But I do buy food from him to help me out when I am too busy to make my own food.

You can buy a 1 lb bag of bay scallops for pretty cheap in the freezer section of the grocery store and they make perfect bight size individually frozen morsels.. Tilapia is cheap too. I breed my own guppies, brine shrimp and daphnia. I also culture sheets of algae for feeding juvenile fish and the brine shrimp.

Any time I cook fish for myslef, I save a small piece for the fish too. It also helps that I work in the field for NOAA all summer long and have access to all the fresh fish racks I could ever ask for. (A rack is the fish after the meat is removed.) The rack off a single yellow fin tuna will have almost a full pound of scrap meat on it. I get racks from tuna, bass, flounder, mahi mahi and blue fish in far larger quantities than I have the time to strip. In a 15 min interval after my shift is over I can fill a 1 gallon zip lock bag with all the fresh caught fish meat I can fit in it. Wash my hands and go home. It is all mixed together and frozen into little cubes for later feedings. I also grab blue mussles and grass shrimp with a net when ever I get the chance, they get eaten pretty quick.

Dandilion greens and spinach make a GREAT substitute for seaweed. I have a huge garden, my omnivores eat a lot of fresh (or frozen when out of season) veggies. I now have an aquaponics set up on top of 2 tanks that are helping to keep the greens coming year round.

 

[Mr Pleco]

" Cow brains. Sheep guts. Chicken heads. Road kill. Rancid grain. These are a few of the so-called nutritionally balanced ingredients found in the commercial pet food served to companion animals every day. "

Cost of Pet food does not equate to quality, maybe just higher profits for the manufacturer?

"Fish meal can be classified as two basic types; 1) fishery waste associated with the processing of fish for human consumption and 2) fish that are only used for the production of fish meal. The composition of fish meal can vary considerable depending upon the composition (whole fish, fish scraps, etc.) of the substrate that is used to prepare the fish meal. "

Pet food is mostly waste by products from food processing and rendering plants.

Labels are misleading, protein content is a crude protein , it might not even be digestable..chicken feathers are huge for boosting pet food protien content.

 

[Allan01230]

Go with New Life Spectrum.

 

[SpeshulEd]

Have you heard of AAFCO (Association of Amercian Feed Control Officials)? They regulate pet food in the United States. Most dog and cat foods are high in specific nutrients that can impact specific body organs in a very negative way -- phosphorus, sodium and fat. Excessive sodium and fat increase palatibility but are not healthy. There are some companies that don't overload their products with excessive nutrients and also practice and believe in "lifestage nutrition". Which company did you work for?

I didn't work for one directly, I repped many of the "top" brands common on store shelves. I don't want to name names, because they still have a part in my pay check, but at the end of the day, I wouldn't feed any of the food that I rep to my pets.

The sawdust/motor oil/leather idea comes from the cbc documentary, "A Dog's Breakfast" http://www.cbc.ca/doczone/dogsbreakfast.html - which is an excellent pet food documentary I'd recommend to anyone.

Fact of the matter is, corn might be great, but its filler in most pet food and usually the first ingredient you find. We tell customers that the first 4 ingredients are the most important. If corn is listed as any of those, I wouldn't buy the food.

 

[CHOMPERS]

This thread is doing a huge disservice to MFK.

The general population walks through life with very little in the way of critical thinking skills, so it is understandable that the membership here pretty much follows suit. Maybe the university systems are not pushing it; I don't know. Those few that should have honed critical thinking skills are failing to use them in this thread. It is my firm belief that the more knowledgeable members should help the less knowledgeable/experienced members in a fair and unbiased way. So far, this has not happened.

This is my attempt to put the context of this thread into common sense terms:
For a minute, let’s talk about human food. There is a spectrum of fast food, instant/microwave ready, home cooking, and natural/health food. Some people live only on fast food and some only eat the health foods. The majority of the population exists on a combination of mostly microwave foods and home cooking. Those who only eat the healthiest of foods also tend to be the most vocal about it ("health food nuts", vegans, your skinny aunt last Thanksgiving, and let's not forget 'Super Size Me'). After all, you never hear a slob in a fast food restaurant say "I wish those damn Vegans would eat a burger and shut the F up". (Well, actually some times you do.) Anyway, back on topic, the general population is quite healthy for the most part. Sure, you can argue that cancer, etc. is on the rise but you also have to acknowledge that life spans are much longer now and we are growing taller (and it's all been blamed/attributed to the food we eat (and/or other causes)).
So what does this all mean?
Well, feeders are the fish worlds fast food, pellets are microwave/instant food, and prepared foods are home cooking. I'm going to need help with a health food analogy because I'm really not that anal about it. (I don't put my fish on a pedestal because after all, "they are just fish". Yes MFK, we love them but at the end of the day, they are still just fish. Sorry about being honest.)

Feeders/fast food
Again, feeders are the equivalent of fast food. Given the chance, your fish will eat feeders all day and then never touch pellets again. However, feeders are raised in the worst of conditions and by the time they reach your retailer, they are malnourished and visibly starving. If they are not gut loaded prior to feeding to your fish, your fish will get minimal nourishment from them. Your fish won’t wither up and die, but they won’t thrive either. (HITH has been attributed to feeding with malnourished feeders and other poor diets.)

Pellets/microwave food
Actually it isn’t fair to lump all pellets together. They too cover a broad spectrum. However, they don’t deserve the slandering with the eccentricities that they received in this thread. I’ll explain more of that later.
Fish farmers and hatcheries have been using pellets for decades with excellent success. Purina Gamefish Chow and Catfish Chow are staples to the commercial and state run hatcheries.
I have been feeding with Purina Gamefish Chow for years and have recently purchased another 50 pounder. I can say a lot of good things about it but there’s one thing I’ll tell ya… it ain’t Hikari. A friend gave me some fish a long time ago and they have since been living on Gamefish Chow. He recently fell on hard times and brought his fish over for me to babysit (from the same spawn as the ones he gave me). He has been feeding exclusively with Hikari, and the colors are clearly more vibrant, and the growth rate is noticeably better. On the other hand, when you consider the economics, the Gamefish Chow wins out. The difference doesn’t justify a product that costs 6875% more money. Fish farmers and hatcheries would not be able to stay in business if they had to pay what we do for Hikari.

And just a word about feeding our loving sea kittens imperfect food. Fish don’t care if they get the leftovers from the production of human food. They will eat a rotting corps and then tell you how delicious it was. “Gross” and “disgusting” are words/concepts that humans invented. The concept of ‘disgusting’ does not exist in the animal kingdom. Some dogs love to eat cat poo. Hamsters love their own poo. If a human eats his own poo, we’ll lock him up in a tiny padded room and throw away the key.

Prepared foods/healthy home cooking
There are many threads on this site and others with personal recipes for making prepared foods. The quality and ingredients can be carefully controlled by the hobbiest. However, considering we are living in the microwave era, many of us don’t have the time or patients to make prepared foods. They can be quite complex but they can also be quite simple. A common ingredient in prepared foods is food flakes or pellets. The reasoning is that the pellets are already supplemented with vitamins and minerals. Another simple prepared food is simply soaking pellets in a liquid multi-vitamin such as Centrum Liquid. This little cheater method can turn even the lowest quality pellets into high quality gems.




About the unfair and ruthless slandering of the pellets:
We were not responsible in our renderings of the ingredients in the pellets. From the posts that followed, some of you took our posts as factual but they were grossly slanted from a very biased point of view. You can do that with almost any product. In fact, the health food nuts do it all the time when they bash mainstream food. (Ever see the crap that airs on Daytime TV?)

So what I did to rip on the Hikari ingredients was to pick one and then I did an internet search. I had to weed through several pages, but eventually you’ll find a sentence or short paragraph that will say what you want. For each short negative quote that I posted, there were mounds of positive information that I didn’t post. Some ingredients didn’t have any negatives, so I didn’t post anything about them. But nobody called that into question.

One good example is Copper Sulfate. That’s a chemical that I’m quite familiar with. It has tons of goods and some well known bads. In low doses, it has medicinal properties (that’s good). In high doses, it can cause heavy metal poisoning (very bad). No company is going to torpedo their product after spending millions in marketing campaigns. Common sense will tell you that. So is Copper Sulfate in high doses or low doses? If the common sense thing wasn’t enough, being at the end of the ingredient list is an indication that it is in low doses (the ingredients are always listed from the highest percentage to the lowest). So Copper Sulfate is in low doses in Hikari Cichlid and has medicinal effects (also acts as a preservative). It helps to kill intestinal parasites. That’s a very good thing, right?

Aluminum Sulfate was another no brainer. High levels of aluminum have been found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. However, there has never been a direct link to the consumption of aluminum. Very high doses on a regular basis would be required to cause it in a person not prone to get the disease. Fish don’t get Alzheimer’s (at least, so far I’ve never heard of it, and fish don’t live long enough). The quote that I posted applies to humans, not fish.


Magnesium Sulfate is used to treat dropsy and bloating. Your fish will thank you for it.

Floor sweepings and garbage:
They are extreme emotional generalizations that distract the reader from the facts at hand and replace them with negative emotions. Advertising agencies, marketing firms, and extremist organizations such as PETA use tactics like this all the time. After that negative emotion hits home, it is difficult to undo.

Wheat middlings is an inexpensive byproduct intermediate of human food processing, commonly referred to as floor sweepings

It’s “refered to”, not “is”. That’s the difference. Once this little error slipped in, we just went with it and no one called us on it. Here is a more accurate definition without the biased overtone:

middlings

Any of various products of commodities of intermediate quality, grade, size, etc., as the coarser particles of ground wheat mingled with bran.

Word Origin & History
Middling (adj.)
1456, from Scottish mydlyn, from M.E. middle + suffix –ing. Used to designate the second of three grades of goods.

The second of three, and the floor or a broom has nothing to do with it. If you really think about it, there’s not enough on the floor in even the messiest of factories to sustain another industry (garbage men not included).

Speaking of garbage, the word garbage came up quite often as a replacement for ‘meal’ and ‘byproduct’.
Here are those definitions:

meal n.

1. The edible whole or coarsely ground grains of a cereal grass.
2. A granular substance produced by grinding.

by-product

Something produced in the process of making something else. When plants produce carbohydrates by photosynthesis, oxygen is released as a by-product. Asphalt and paraffin are by-products of the process of refining crude oil into gasoline.

So to wrap this up (should have done it a long time ago), there are always two sides to every coin. Our absurdities were… well… just absurd.

Btw, if you actually read this thing all the way through, you might just win a prize.

 

[kdrun76]

I did read the whole thing and I will respectfully disagree with about 90% of it.

My first problem is... any chance you could post in a legible color? Why post something so thoughtfully written in blue on a blue background unless your goal was to be irritating? That text has to be highlighted in order to be read.

I earned my masters degree making fish food for the aquaculture industry 10 years ago. I have been in many fish feed manufacturing plants, I have been in hundreds of aquaculture facilities and I have gone to the wheat rendering plants to attain the "wheat midlings" needed. The food I made used the waste product from the local quohogging industry as the protein component, but in order to do a fair and controlled study I had to also make the same recipe using fish meal instead. I also grew control fish on Zeigler brand pellets (an aquaculture industry standard.)

The wheat grinders have huge dust trays to catch the middlings, those trays are swept out. Any on the floor under the machine is added to the pile.

I have raised fish on pellets, home made food that is made with industry ingredients (fish meal) and home made food made with quohog bellies (also industrial garbage). I do know what I am talking about.

If you want to grow healthy fish you need to use healthy ingredients. Its the difference between survive and thrive.

Yes, your fish will survive on that Purina food, no they will not thrive on it. As you said... they are just fish. So, be happy to have them survive and feed them industrial waste. That is your choice.

Anytime you want to see healthy and thriving fish, let me know.