On the parrot wizards forum someone told me that pellets can cause a lot of problems she also just told me yesterday to stop feeding Tiko egg all together because of the cholesterol thats it bad for them and they dont need it.Well Tiko loves her egg so ill still give her some just not too often.

There's a lot of wrong information that's believed very passionately on the internet, so it's always a good idea to check the facts. Pellets are very beneficial for the vast majority of birds, but there are some who have trouble with them. Eclectus parrots in particular tend to be very sensitive and are more likely than most to have problems with pellets. But decades of experience show that most birds do just fine on a diet of 80% pellets and sometimes more. Even 100% pellets isn't always bad, but most people aren't comfortable with that level. There are a lot of well-informed people who think that about 50% is good.

Well-informed avian vets are currently advising against feeding any kind of animal protein to parrots including egg and meat, because dietary cholesterol can apparently trigger atherosclerosis in parrots. Personally I'm a little skeptical of this. I suspect that for both birds and humans, your physical fitness and activity level play a huge role in how well you can handle certain foods. A bird that flies and is active is probably a lot less likely to have problems than one that just sits around on a perch all day. I do give small amounts of egg to my birds twice a week. I also feed lots of butter to myself lol and my cholesterol level is perfect.

Yes she also told me not to believe everything from the internet lol I think cholesterol would be different for birds.

Actually it seems like birds might be MORE sensitive to dietary cholesterol than humans are. After decades of telling us we shouldn't eat cholesterol, the medical profession has finally acknowledged that dietary cholesterol doesn't actually seem to matter. But based on preliminary studies it looks like it might cause problems for birds.

On the other hand, everything in an egg came out of a bird, and the cholesterol in the egg was made in the hen's body. An egg contains everything you need to build a complete baby bird from scratch, so it seems like it ought to have some value for maintaining an adult bird too.

I think eggs are one of those foods that's ok in moderation, but too much would be bad. One because of the high protein, and one because of the cholesterol.

B, can you list me all the foods Rio eats on a daily basis? Also, how are veggies prepared? Are they fresh, and given daily? Most leafy greens are high in water, and may cause the bird to poop a lot, because that's also how they rid the urine in their bodies. From what you're describing though, I doubt this is the case. Just making sure, though.

FWIW here are a couple of studies on atherosclerosis in parrots:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1 ... 04.9695168
This one noted a correlation between dietary cholesterol and atherosclerosis but it looks like the data is pretty meager. One of the references involved a single African grey parrot who had eaten egg every day for three years, but a single case doesn't prove anything. The other reference was a 1961 study on budgies who were fed cholesterol as 2% of the diet (which seems pretty high), with no information on how many budgies were involved or exactly what happened. It also notes that having adequate Omega 3 fats in the diet seems to reduce cholesterol. Those are fairly hard to get in the modern diet though, but kiwi fruit seed is loaded with it and my birds like to eat them.

http://www.researchgate.net/publication ... and_Beyond
This one mentions a high calorie high fat diet as being a problem but I don't see any mention of dietary cholesterol being a problem. However the same first author induced atherosclerosis in quaker parrots in a different study by feeding them a diet of 1% cholesterol (which also seems like a high level IMO). There were 12 experimental birds and four controls. http://vet.sagepub.com/content/50/6/1116.short

So based on limited observations it looks like consuming huge amounts of cholesterol can cause problems for birds. We don't have any information on whether smaller, sensible amounts would cause any problems. My personal feeling is that it's probably not a big deal in a bird that is active, healthy and not overweight. But this is just guesswork so don't take that as gospel. The whole situation feels a lot like the anti-cholesterol scare that was directed at humans for decades.

Speaking of too much protein, a study on cockatiels found that they were able to handle a diet of 70% protein for eleven months (the duration of the study) with no problems. That is REALLY excessive, and most pellets are in the 12-15% range. It seems likely that the 70% level was supposed to be an insane overkill amount that would establish a benchmark that they could compare less drastic levels to, but it didn't work out that way. If there's a dangerously high protein level for cockatiels it's apparently more than 70%. It's obviously not a good idea to feed a cockatiel this much protein, and there's no guarantee that other species would be able to tolerate such a high level. But I don't think we have to worry about getting too much protein from eating pellets because it's not even close to any conceivable danger point. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11435523

The woman I was telling you about was specifically talking about Tiko and she helped me with Tikos new diet she also had other things adding into that protein including eggs,chicken and vegetables.

I decided to find out what feeding cholesterol as 1-2% of the diet really means. Long story short, I figured out that 15 grams of food per day is a conservative estimate of what a cockatiel would eat. If I've done the math right, 1% of that is 150 milligrams of cholesterol being given to a hypothetical test cockatiel every day, or 300 milligrams if the experimental level is 2% of the diet.

300 milligrams per day is the old recommended limit for humans, so we're talking about a VERY excessive amount for a 3-ounce bird. A large chicken egg contains 186 milligrams of cholesterol, and I doubt that it's physically possible for a cockatiel to eat a whole egg yolk in a single day. These "overkill" studies tell us that ridiculous amounts are bad, but they don't tell us anything about sensible amounts.