Next up is hi feng, a chinese company that makes some of the best color enhancing pellets on the market IMO.
It's Hai Feng, and they are based in Taiwan, not China. Very well known for containing sooooo much color enhancing agent, that it will turn a fish that is naturally yellow, unnaturally orange.
Main ingredient in many of their formulas that I've seen is ... wheat.
Ing. are listed in order from most to least on the label.Nls third ing. is wheat flour. so i guess You will find alot of ground wheat in Nls. Don't get Me wrong it's top notch food but I still find it a notch below xtreme.
A common mistake made by many hobbyists that don't understand how to properly dissect an ingredient list. Unless you are privy to the inclusion rate of each ingredient, your reasoning is full of more holes than swiss cheese. As an example, in a 2000 pound batch of food, let's assume that product A uses 150 lb's of krill meal, 150 lb's of generic fish meal, 100 lb's of herring meal, and 100 pounds of shrimp meal - (500 lb total)
Product B uses 375 lb's of krill meal, and 350 lb's of herring meal - (725 lb total)
The next ingredient listed by weight in both formulas is wheat flour (used as a binding agent) - how can you conclude by the fact that product B has only 2 ingredients pre the wheat flour listing, that it has more wheat flour in it than product A? The reality is, you can't.
What
can be concluded from the label that you provided, is that Xtreme has not only wheat flour (as a binding agent) but also includes more wheat (ground wheat) as well as soybean meal, which quite frankly I personally refuse to feed to any fish that I own.
And FMS, while I see that you edited your earlier comment, there is a major difference between soybean meal, and soy isolate/concentrate. The former contains anti-nutritional factors and costs a fraction of what soy isolate costs, and isolate and/or concentrate do not contain any of the associated anti-nutritional factors found in soybean meal. Ultimately you can use a LOT less soy isolate/concentrate to get the same job done, it just costs a lot more.
"Soybean meal (SBM). Although SBM is already a part of some fish diets, its use is also limited. It's generally kept to less than 20 per cent of the feed because at higher levels, fish reduce food intake, and their growth slows. High levels of SBM also damage the animals' intestinal cells. Bureau believes those effects may be caused by the presence of naturally occurring compounds called saponins in the SBM. He's monitoring fish fed a diet high in soya saponin to evaluate the exact effects; if saponins are proven responsible for the problems, he believes geneticists may be able to breed soybeans with little or no saponins that could be used to develop feeds. A soybean concentrate that does not include saponins and is eaten more readily by fish already exists, but the cost of the extraction process makes it quite expensive. Bureau is looking at the effects of saponins on fish growth, energy use, digestion of nutrients and intestinal membrane physiology."
http://www.uoguelph.ca/research/publications/Assets/HTML_MAGS/oasis/nutrition3.html
That being said, now that New Life is manufacturing their own food on site, even soy isolate is going to be removed from all of their formulas.
There are better ways to get the job done, and I commend Pablo for taking yet another step to improve the quality of his products.
