Dried fish foods

[Nancy P]

Have been re-reading the ingredients (aka ‘fine print’ )in some foods I received recently with used tank: am I being overly concerned/picky, when I don’t like seeing ‘wheat gluten’, ‘cornstarch’, ‘ground brown rice’, ‘potato protein’, …etc? And what the heck is ‘dried fish protein digest’? 

[Keeg]

Im pretty sure that is fish meal and that is made of smaller fish that people dont want. So they take the small fish like anchovies and grind them up into a paste, add in a bunch of other stuff, and then dry it out, then boom you got fish flakes! 

[Scapexghost]

Basically every fish food on the market contains one of these or something similar.

Edited July 1, 2022 by Scapexghost

[ccc24]

You can’t avoid binders - otherwise the food won’t hold together. It shouldn’t be most of the ingredients but one (or more) will be there in a pelleted food.

[Nancy P]

Thank you….I kind of figured those are binding agents

[Gwallace]

Binders.  Unavoidable in flake and pellet foods.  I feed a few "bug based" pellet foods but even they contain binders.

[Odd Duck]

These ingredients are not just binders or fillers.  They contain nutrients, too.  So finding them on the ingredient list is far less important than choosing a food where you trust the manufacturer.  It’s not just about ingredients, it’s about nutrients.  It’s about companies that actually do diet trials and test their foods.  So pick a company you trust and trust them to do their job correctly.