cooked food

Good Morning Prof

On fish webpages i see that they recommend cooked spinach, peas or lettuce for herbivores. Is raw food better or is the the cooked food sufficient as fishfood??

Thanks

Nick van der Berg

 

Dear Nick,

With vegetables this is always a debatable matter.

Legumes such as peas, beans and soya beans are just simply less digestible if they are not boiled. The proteins are not digestible in this case. For humans you cannot absorb the nutrients out of soya beans if you do not boil them for quite an extended period for example. So I would also say that beans and peas should be boiled. However, if you use frozen young peas, then a lot of boiling is not needed.

When you use spinach, you actually have to be careful not to boil too much. Boiling breaks the cells in the leaves and the contents will then leak out into the cooking water literally, so if you throw the cooking water away then all the nutrients are removed as well. So boiling of spinach must only be done for one or two minutes at most.

In general many foods suffer from boiling as nutrients are actually destroyed by heat, and particularly microwaves, so one must be careful to cook for an absolute minimum amount of time so that you can just release the nutrients, but not destroy or release them into the cooking water.

Kind regards,

Dirk

 

What about steaming the vegetables, Prof? Wouldn't the steaming process have much less of a damaging effect than boiling?

 

Hi Slagter,

With regard to heat, the steaming process is just as hot as boiling is, so this the same really, the only difference is that you do not have water into which the cell contents of the vegetables are released.

Kind regards,

Dirk

 

I had just put a slice of cucumber in water and in the microwave for 30 secs. Tore into smaller pieces and gave to the Silver Dollars. They loved it! Let's just hope my Pleco will also eat some of it when it sinks. He has no algae to eat.

Thanks Oom!

 

Razer,

take a piece of cucumber and stick a stainless steel fork into it and put it into the tank. It will obviously sink and your Pleco will have lekker supper.

Kind regards,

Dirk

 

Ah OK I'll try tomorrow. Some of the pieces I gave sank without being eaten but the Pleco didn't budge. The silver dollars picked it up and ate it.

 

I found that the best time for me to feed my pleco and hifin zebra cucumber is right before lights out. The 2 have different grazing grounds so I use 2 pieces. It will help to observe them after lights out to see where they hang out. Next morning "hoover" the pleco never leaves a trace apart from the cake fork I use. Missy on the other hand sleeps on her left overs

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