F/T Kills Thiamine Important B Vitamin

Alright This is a question to all those who prefer Frozen Thawed over Live. I was doing some research on Ball Pythons and came across something I found quite interesting. Apparently an important B Vitamin called Thiamine is used by all living creatures to metabolize carbs and fats to produce energy. It is essential for normal growth and development and helps maintain functioning of the heart, central nervous system, and digestion.

However, the thiamine found in mice and rats is destroyed when that animal is frozen. This leads me to believe that Ball Pythons fed F/T are not receiving sufficient helpings of this vitamin. And could lead to malnutrition or pre mature death.

To all of those out there that do F/T meals, do you give vitamin supplements to your snake OR believe this whole study to be plain gibberish?

So, if freezing destroys Thiamine and all living creatures need it, then why aren't YOU eating live animals????

I'm sure that we get B1 through other foods we eat or combination of foods and drinks. What else do snakes eat but animals:rolleyes:???????????

Umm not sure but my snakes seem to do fine on F/T and have been for a good long time. So who published this report a company pushing B vitmans?


Chuck

I'm new at this but it seems that F/T is just way to damn messy and to much work...Storing them, thawing them out, wiggiling them for your snake...I prefer real live food as they would have in the wild. You might call me different but I enjoy the hunt probably more than the snake does.

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Originally Posted by giaach

Alright This is a question to all those who prefer Frozen Thawed over Live. I was doing some research on Ball Pythons and came across something I found quite interesting. Apparently an important B Vitamin called Thiamine is used by all living creatures to metabolize carbs and fats to produce energy. It is essential for normal growth and development and helps maintain functioning of the heart, central nervous system, and digestion.

However, the thiamine found in mice and rats is destroyed when that animal is frozen. This leads me to believe that Ball Pythons fed F/T are not receiving sufficient helpings of this vitamin. And could lead to malnutrition or pre mature death.

To all of those out there that do F/T meals, do you give vitamin supplements to your snake OR believe this whole study to be plain gibberish?

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If possible could you link to the site or sites you researched on Billy. :)

This actually sounds a lot like an article I read several decades ago about frozen fish being an unhealthy feeder source for garter snakes. I wish I could remember more about it, but I seriously doubt that there is any actual evidence of frozen rodents being unhealthy for rodent eating snakes.

Hi,

Like Mark I remember this being dicussed concerning feeder fish for garters as the freezing turned the tyamin into thyaminase or something? Ironically the recomendation I remember was to try and convert them onto rodents if possible and add live fish feeders occasionally if it wasn't. :rolleyes:

I tried to find a link to the artical but failed sorry. Hopefully someone knows where it is because my memory is not reliable enough for anything important.:)


dr del

Could you please reference the paper/s and supporting organisations that this information comes from. Since people have been feeding F/T mice/rats to snakes for many generations now and seemingly to no deterimental effect.

In England it is illegal to feed live animals to another (excluding insects as food), nor is it legal to kill an animal for food without certain licences. Special dispensation is made for venomous research snakes as they are nearly all captured from the wild and will not take prekilled mice/rats.

I can't imagine that feeding f/t would be detrimental but I wouldn't be surprised if live was healthier by having higher vitamin content as opposed to frozen.

I have found a paper written in the journal of nutrition Ref. 1, which investigates the break down of thiamine in wet feed stock, not a mouse, but it would be a similar trend. They found that freezing slows the breakdown of the thiamine by oxidation or reduction by sulphur dioxide or casein. The freezing also inactivates the thiaminase which cleaves the thiamine. Mice do not contain casein, but do produce sulphur dioxide. Therefore freezing is the best way of preserving the thiamine for long term storage.

A fresh mouse will contain higher thiamine as it is replaced naturally whilst it is alive as it eats seeds and grain and but will quickly breakdown after death if it is warm almost 50% in 1 hour. A snake can handle lower concentrations of thiamine due to its efficient use of water, thiamine is very soluble and will only accumilate in the muscles for a short period in mammals as they deficate and urinate often. Whilst in the muscle it is converted into less soluble thiamin pyrophosphate Ref . 2, which is a co-enzyme that helps other enzymes in the digestion of carbohydrate (something a mouse has fairly little of anyway). In snakes it will remain in the muscle tissue longer and more will be converted.

It does sound plausible. I mean, I prefer fresh meat over meat that has been frozen for months. I like my food fresh, but I have a hard time acknowledging that feeding f/t has any detrimental effects on snakes. Something to think about.

Okay, since everyone has been asking for a link to this information, I think I can explain where this all came from. When I first started doing research on Ball Pythons I found this site called reptilestv.com now it was pretty basic when it came to information but the herpetologist/host mentioned in the feeding video that frozen thawed is not as good because it kills thiamine, yada yada yada. So being curious I wiki'd thiamine and got all this information about the vitamin and its relation to bps. While I don't have a physical link to a article, all of this stems from a past article I read about feeding goldfish to piranhas, which I had at the time. The reason I decided to post this thread was manly because I know so many of you feed f/t, and I was curious to hear your opinions on this topic. While most people I assume would just blow off this bit of BP urban legend, I figured I see what everyone had to say.

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Originally Posted by MarkS

So, if freezing destroys Thiamine and all living creatures need it, then why aren't YOU eating live animals????

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because we feed on a variety of foods that contain this vitamin and others and we take vitamin supplements , roddents are the only supplier of nutrients and vitamins for the snakes . Got it :O !

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Originally Posted by drugaria

because we feed on a variety of foods that contain this vitamin and others and we take vitamin supplements , roddents are the only supplier of nutrients and vitamins for the snakes . Got it :O !

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Couldn't be more right. Almost everything we eat is enriched some how.

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because we feed on a variety of foods that contain this vitamin and others and we take vitamin supplements , roddents are the only supplier of nutrients and vitamins for the snakes . Got it

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I don't know... I think we really ought to start swallowing whole live animals just to be on the safe side. Maybe those wacky collegian antics of yesteryear of seeing how many goldfish you could swallow weren't such a bad idea after all? Go ahead, I double dare ya to swallow a live pinkie. :D:P:D:P:D:P;)

There are other water-soluble vitamins that break down when frozen, given time. However, I think that anyone feeding f/t that goes through their frozen stock at least once every 6 months has little to worry about nutrition-wise.

That being said, there have not been any studies done on the nutritional needs of ball pythons, so we don't really know if they are being hurt or helped from eating frozen rodents.

What we do know, however, is that many keepers have raised many healthy ball pythons on f/t rodents. Regardless of the freezing effect on nutrients, I think that speaks for itself.

I still prefer to feed live food, though...but not for nutritional reasons...

there are untold differences between live/frozen foods. This may be the first discovery of a hundred that suggest we are doing better by our snakes by feeding them the way nature intended.

It is for this reason that i raise my own feeders and feed them live meals when production is good.

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Originally Posted by MarkS

I don't know... I think we really ought to start swallowing whole live animals just to be on the safe side. Maybe those wacky collegian antics of yesteryear of seeing how many goldfish you could swallow weren't such a bad idea after all? Go ahead, I double dare ya to swallow a live pinkie. :D:P:D:P:D:P;)

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It is worth trying it :P:P:P :rolleye2:

I saw this on a video on youtube.

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Originally Posted by MarkS

So, if freezing destroys Thiamine and all living creatures need it, then why aren't YOU eating live animals????

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lol! A co-worker of mine was looking down his nose at F/T, going off about how snakes (reptiles in general, actually - broad discussion) don't find such in the wild.

I nodded through his whole line of reasoning, but had to ask him how the hunt-and-kill went.

To his blank-stare response, I simply pointed to the sandwhich on his desk and repeated, "Hunt-and-kill".

He didn't have a lot to say after that. ;)

It's an interesting question, though. Our diets are quite diverse, ESPECIALLY in comparison to our snakes. Where we can make up a deficiency in one food or even category with another food or category without even thinking about it, not-so for them.

But I'm new to this, so *shrug*. My wife gave me my first baby BP just a few days ago (gorgeous, extremely curious... just wish the pet store that raised her the last few months had kept the climate more humid. She - I think it's a "she" anyway - is shedding in patches. Keeping her humidity around 80% and doing the warm-soak thing to help her out).

Looking forward to the discussion on this one. I'm used to phosphorous/calcium balancing, D3 supplementing, etc etc for lizards, so thiamine supplementation could easily become routine for me (assuming I find a reliable source of supplement, anyway).

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Originally Posted by MarkS

So, if freezing destroys Thiamine and all living creatures need it, then why aren't YOU eating live animals????

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ahhhh good point but do we freeze all of our foods? no. some are left not frozen and are eaten just cooked.

but how could you suppliment the vitamines and minerals w/o harming the snake.would you put a pill in the mouse or something?

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Originally Posted by pythontricker

but how could you suppliment the vitamines and minerals w/o harming the snake.would you put a pill in the mouse or something?

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Dust the mouse (probably pretty far from an ideal way), soak or spray it , maybe inject it. Maybe a water-additive instead. Lots of ways.

We always did the shake-and-bake-in-a-plastic-baggie powdering thing when enriching crickets for our lizards.

oooooooooh

I would like to point out that at least 90% of the proteins and vitamins in food are broken down when cooked, and more than 60% of minerals are lost in the water during boiling. This of course doesn't matter for your snake but you don't get the nutrients you think you do just because of a diverse food range.

Thiamine is only really high in cereals and grains (why whole grain is healthy) and is only really useful in the metabolism of said cereals and grains (high is sugars and starch), it has other uses in the body but considering a human uses several thousand calories a day just sleeping (22W used by brain, 10-15w by muscles) and maintaining body temp (120w) vs a snake which probably needs only a couple of hundred calories per day as it doesn't regulate its body temp and when cold can slow its metabolism. It becomes clear how it can survive on rodents considering that if it hasn't eaten anything containing thiamine in 10 hours, 90% will have left its system (see references from previous post).