[:"blue"] Glider Greetings: <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wave.gif" alt="" />
For those of you who have a long memory, perhaps you will remember a thread I started a while ago on the nutritional analysis of the BML
diet. I presented some figures and thoughts on the BML mix and the fruit component of the
diet; but got hung up on the veggie component and an analysis of the full
diet. I had some difficulty finding information on some veggies and the work was very time consuming because I didn't have computer software to facilitate the math calculations. Well, the USDA has totally revised and updated their
National Nutritional Database so nutritional information is more complete and more readily available and I now have additional computer capability to do the number crunching.
I've been doing some more work on this project over the past couple of weeks and am now ready to present some figures on the veggie component of the BML
diet and after a little more work over the weekend will have figures for the total
diet. I need to double check a few numbers; but preliminary results are suggesting something very surprising about the total BML
diet, which, if validated, will be a very interesting piece of information about the BML
diet that has not previously been reported to the general glider community!!
Stay tuned.....
And now, a comment or two about the attached chart. The top chart is a dry weight analysis of the veggie mix that I use. The lower left chart shows the water content of the veggies and the lower right chart shows the total "wet" analysis. The veggies that I used for the calculation were mixed veggies from the local Albertson's. The mix contains carrots, corn, green beans, Lima beans and peas. To have numbers that were as accurate as possible, I took a bag of veggies and sorted and weighed each individual veggie type. The % by weight of each veggie is as follows: carrots 26%, corn 24%, green beans 13%, Lima beans 7% and peas 30%. If you are using a similar mix from your store the percentages may be a little different; but the overall result won't be much different as most of the nutrition comes from the BML mix. Note how bad the Ca:P ratio is for corn and that the peas and the Lima beans also have quite a bit more phosphorus than calcium, which results in an overall negative Ca:P ratio of 2.5:1. Take note that the veggies are 82% water and only 3% protein. Fruit is about 86% water and only 1% protein, so you can see why a lot of gliders don't drink too much water from their bottles.
Again a reminder to everyone, I'm not a college educated nutritionist, just a glider owner who is good with math and interested in gathering a better understanding of glider
diets. If you have any questions, I'll try to answer them; but there are a lot of
diet questions that don't yet have answers.
If you have not seen or would like to review the previous threads, you can find them here:
Parts 1 and 2-BML MIXPart 3-FruitsPart 4-Veggies [/]