Very cool work. I'm excited to read your findings!!
We've done extensive work evaluating plant based proteins, especially soy. We've successfully grown salmonids on fish meal free diets on commercial scales using modified soy without common problems like enteritis or poor fcr.
Traditional feeds tend to view all ingredients on a protein basis and, to some extent, ignore the potentially bad components those ingredients bring with them. Starches are important to extrusion so they are difficult to eliminate completely...especially in a marketplace that likes floating feeds.
We work a lot with extrusion technology, feed formulations, and ingredient quality to design feeds around the nutrition and not the limitations of extrusion or least cost approaches.
I run a small extrutech extruder and make small test batches regularly. I'm happy to contribute what I can to aid in your research. This kind of work is very exciting and critical to improving feeds. Traditional feeds stem from markets where the goal is to grow fish quickly for human consumption...those are likely not the same diets that promote health and longevity. Shoot me an email and we can work out more details Dustin@optimalfishfood.com.
McDonalds is super cheap and sure helps increase my weight quickly...but I'm not sure its helps me in the long run.
