[JohnPaul]

Loaches with shrimp are a bad idea. The baby shrimplets will be toast and the loaches may get some of the adults when they molt; even with hiding places loaches are the most amazing aquarium fish when it comes to exploring every tiny little nook & cranny for food.

As for the food, how much and how often are you feeding? Anything with copper is a potential hazard; the more you feed, the more worried I would be. This is another advantage of a shrimp-only tank; if you remove the loaches, then essentially you don't need to feed the tank at all (if it's well-aged) unless you have, oh, probably 100 shrimp+ shrimp or so.

 

[JohnPaul]

Spinach is 14-16% copper? Am I just reading that wrong, because that doesn't make any sense.

Either there's a typo there or else this guy from HBH is absolutely looney.

EDIT:

Just looked up some info online. Based on this chemical analysis of cooked spinach....

180g spinach sample had 0.3 mg copper. Remember, 1 mg = 0.001 gram. So out of 180g of spinach, 0.0003g of that is copper. That's 0.000167% (or, 167 ppm). In other words, the HBH wafers contain approximately ONE THOUSAND TIMES more copper than spinach does.

Another analysis of spinach (raw this time) gave a result of 0.093 mg copper in a 100g serving of spinach, yielding a result of 0.000093% copper (93 ppm). That's even lower than the other study.

The end result: the level of copper naturally occurring in spinach is miniscule compared to the copper content of copper-containing fish foods.

P.S. -- I think "Mike" from HBH got confused between copper content and nutritional value. A 180g serving of spinach contains around 14-16% of the RDA (recommended daily allowance) of copper. Perhaps he saw that 14-16% number and thought it meant the spinach was 14-16% copper. (I dunno...seems like a pretty dumb error but I'm trying to give the guy the benefit of the doubt, rather than be cynical and think he was intentionally trying to be misleading.)