Pet food manufacturers would have you believe that their packaged, highly-processed diets provide adequate amounts of nutrition to achieve and maintain optimum pet health… just like a fast food restaurant would love for you to believe that a burger, fries, and a soda is a healthy, nutritious diet choice for you. Today, pet food practices are exposed to the whole world, let’s discuss.
But you know that you’d never feel great on a fast food diet, so consider this; today’s pet diets consist of the most highly processed foods on the planet and you feed this food to your best friend every single day.
Today’s commercially prepared pet foods fail to provide the protein quality or quantity needed to insure that our pets receive optimum nutrition.
In human nutrition, there are RDA’s or Recommended Dietary Allowances. RDA’s are considered to be two standard deviations above Minimum Requirements yet; most human nutritionists agree that RDA’s are considered inadequate for anything above maintenance needs.
So let’s see now… We are actually feeding a pet diet two levels below human RDA’s, which are totally inadequate for human health and well-being. No wonder we are seeing so many health problems in our pets! These minimum requirements in common pet food exposed manufactures intent.
Pet Food Exposed: Corporations True Intentions
Optimum Nutritional Guidelines are essential if pet health and longevity are the goals we hope to someday achieve. Sadly, these nutritional guidelines do not exist for pets. Why?
One reason might be that the U.S. Pet Food Industry is primarily made up of giant corporations who vigorously compete for a share of the $15 Billion annual pet food revenues. These corporations are governed by Board Room decisions that are focused on maximizing profits for shareholders. In other words, economics may be trumping pet health.
Let’s take a closer look at the economics associated with today’s pet foods. Recently, I found a 22 pound premium brand bag of dog food for under $14.00. This equates to $0.63 per pound. If we subtract the cost of manufacturing, marketing, advertising, shipping and the retailers profit leaving only the cost of the ingredients – you shouldn’t be too surprised to hear that the nutritional cost per pound is only a few cents. How nutritious can it be?
Today’s pet food companies tell us that our dogs are no longer carnivores. They do this to justify the large amounts of cheap carbohydrate included in today’s pet diets.
They say it is to spare protein – that is to allow carbohydrate to act as the body’s source of energy in place of using protein. This may be possible but it is certainly not the healthiest choice. For the dog and cat that evolved using protein to provide both energy and the essential building blocks of life, substituting carbohydrate has created more health problems than any other thing we know of.
Note: Typical of their wolf forefathers, dogs do not require any carbohydrate in their diet. This is a scientific fact readily available to all pet food developers. Why then do pet food manufacturers include 40% – 60% carbohydrate (corn, wheat and rice) in the average canine diet?
Pet Food Exposed: The Birth of Commercial Pet Foods
Before commercial pet foods grew in popularity, dogs and cats generally ate whatever food was available to them. Farm pets consumed milk, meat scraps, eggs and anything else they could scavenge. City dogs and cats depended on left over table scraps, cheap meat and bones from the butcher shop plus anything else they could catch that was edible. The very wealthy had gourmet meals prepared for their pets, which could have been a good thing or not based on certain owner’s quirky eating habits.
The historical period of commercial pet food is relatively short in comparison to the length of time that domestic dogs and cats have been on this planet. It was in 1860 when James Spratt, an electrician from Cincinnati, Ohio while selling lightning rods in Europe viewed stray dogs being fed left-over ship’s biscuits by English sailors and decided he could do better. His first processed dog food Spratt’s Patent Meat Fibrine Dog Cakes – a biscuit made of wheat, beet root, vegetables and beef blood was offered to English gentlemen for their sporting dogs. It was an instant success and in 1890 the British company that took over Spratt’s formula brought this new pet diet to America.
Other US companies entered into the arena of pet food manufacturing however, the depression in the 1930’s prompted dog owners to look for less expensive methods of feeding their pets. Less raw meat was fed, and more grains and cereal products were introduced into the diet. Canned meat products were introduced in the 1940’s and in 1943, dehydrated dog food was introduced.
It wasn’t until after World War II however, that the use of commercially prepared pet foods became popular in the United States. Manufacturers and grain dealers found a good source for their by-products in the pet food industry. Slaughterhouses provided non-human grade, diseased meats, unusable parts, and meat by-products to pet food companies. This created a market for products that previously had been discarded. Since many of these meat sources were non-human grade, the practice became common to mix these with the grains and cook them together for many hours or days to kill bacteria and disease. The final mix was then formed into pellets that were easily bagged for convenience of feeding.
Pet Food Exposed: “Clever” Pet Food Marketing
Then, in the 1950’s the Purina Company discovered an innovative new concept for dry dog food. Dry dog food was generally found in two forms prior to this. One was biscuit, or crumbled biscuit, known as kibble, which was baked. The other type was dog food made in pellets of which the ingredients had to be hand mixed. Purina’s new technique was called “extrusion”. The extrusion process consisted of combining and cooking the ingredients together in a liquid form, and then mechanically pushing them through an extruder. These dog food pieces were much larger and lighter than the pellets, giving an appearance of ‘more for your money’. Thus began the onset of ‘clever marketing’ into the race to promote dog food to the public.
Convenience was the first selling point for prepared and packaged dog foods. Scooping dry pieces of food into the dog’s food bowl was more time saving than cooking or preparing their pet’s dinner. The second selling point was developed by a professional marketing campaign. Dog food companies began labeling their dog foods as complete, with no additional foods or supplements being necessary. In fact, they began warning the public that adding table scraps could actually be dangerous to the dog’s health. An active campaign was developed in 1964 through the Pet Food Institute, to inform the public of the dangers of table food scraps, and the importance of feeding processed dog food.
Continuing marketing strategies included using celebrities in television commercials, making dog foods that produced their own ‘gravy’, making dog kibble into various shapes, and using dyes in the dog food so it would look ‘natural’ and pleasing to the dog owner’s eyes. Pet food ads were appearing regularly in the media and designs were developed more to attract the owner’s idea of a tasty and visually attractive meal than for the dogs’ health. Pet food sales moved from the feed stores to the grocery stores, with bright labels and appealing pictures. The marketing strategies were paying off, and soon pet food sales were surpassing the amount of money spent on baby food. Aisle and shelf space for dog food sales were expanding by leaps and bounds as more dog food companies joined the marketing competition.
The next marketing strategy was in specialty diets, formulated for specific diseases or disorders in pets. The first diets were developed for kidney and heart disease in 1948. These have expanded to multiple specialty diets being offered today. Dr. Mark Morris DVM, founder of Hill’s Pet Products (Science Diet) was the first in the field to develop this idea. The Purina Company quickly followed, along with several other companies. Only veterinarians offered these Hill’s prescription products. This really began to portray dog nutrition as complex, and the public relied more on their veterinarian’s advice about nutrition, than trusting their own judgment or common sense. Shopping now expanded from the supermarkets to the veterinarian’s office.
AAFCO is an organization of state and federal officials who regulate pet food. Representatives of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and state regulators participate in AAFCO to develop uniform laws, regulations and rules for pet food products as well as feed products for livestock.
AAFCO has adopted definitions for many of the pet food ingredients found in cat and dog food and has developed complex rules for pet food labels.
Every year AAFCO publishes its Official Publication (OP), a compilation of the most current model law, model regulations, labeling rules, ingredient definitions and other guidance materials adopted by the organization. Copies of the OP are available for purchase from AAFCO.
AAFCO maintains nutrient profiles for cat and dogs food and has developed procedures, called a feeding protocol, to evaluate whether cat and dog food products contain the essential nutrients for healthy pets. Products that provide “complete and balanced” nutrition, or that are similarly labeled, must state whether their nutritional content was verified by testing in a laboratory or through a feeding trial.
The Animal Protection Institute (API), in their article “What’s really in Pet Food” points out that in 1974; AAFCO was formed and organized by the pet food industry. They decided to change the standards of the NRC (National Research Council) testing procedures from extending feeding trials of the dog food over a period of time, to simple testing of the chemical analysis of the dog food. While this provided results for the percentages and breakdowns in the dog food, it certainly didn’t address the type of food used, freshness, or digestibility of each of the ingredients. As API states in their article, this left the pet food industry to police itself, without government intervention.
In 1985, the National Research Council updated their guidelines for nutrition, instituting three important changes. The first was that the percentage requirement was removed for protein, and instead, requirements for ten amino acids were listed by weight of the dog. These were developed for growth and adult stages. The second change was removing the word allowances from the guide and replacing it with the word requirements. This was to provide information on the availability of nutrients in the food when eaten and digested. It also developed a chart that listed factors that could affect the bioavailability of the ingredients of the food chosen and mixed together for dog food.
Pet Food Exposed: Bioavailability Vs. Marketing
Bioavailability is defined as the efficiency of absorption, and the availability of amino acids in the food. The intent of this classification was to take into consideration the affect that processing, heating and cooking had on many of the ingredients. Combining certain ingredients also affects nutrient value, especially the phytates in grains that block certain minerals, and the differences in animal and plant amino acids profiles. The guidelines urged consideration for all the above in formulating percentages of the nutrients in the pet food for analysis AFTER it was actually cooked and processed.
One API report states “Pet food provides a market for grains considered “unfit for human consumption, slaughterhouse offal, and similar waste products that can be turned into profit”
And what was the response from the pet food companies? Today, pet food companies are still using the AAFCO modified 1974 NRC nutritional guidelines. Not only were the 1985 proposed changes never adopted neither has the most recent 2000 NRC Nutrient Requirements of Dogs and Cats, which takes into consideration the past 25 years of nutritional research.
The next trend in commercial pet food was called the “premium” diet. These foods were and still are advertised to be more nutritional for dogs, and they offered different types of blends for all stages of life, including puppy diets, maintenance diets, performance diets and senior dog diets. This brought several new markets for pet foods, and lent a new sense of helplessness to the public. While these foods were advertised as ‘premium’, they were still using the old standards from the 1974 requirements.
In the 1980’s, consumers were becoming more educated on nutrition for their own diets and reading labels on food products. With this information in hand, dog owners began reading the dog food labels and questioning some of the ingredients in pet foods. The ingredients of most concern were the chemical preservatives.
Due to the pressure from the public on the use of these chemicals, many but not all pet food companies have eliminated them, and are now using vitamin C and vitamin E for preserving fat in dog food.
Pet Food Exposed: “Organic” and “Natural” Pet Nutrition
This led to the next trend in commercial dog foods, which is marketing brands that are labeled as natural, either by offering organic foods, human grade foods or new forms of meat to pet foods, such as venison, fish or rabbit. Some even offer whole chickens as the main meat ingredient, and state they don’t use meat by-products or other less nutritious ingredients. However, all the brands offered still continue to heavily process and cook all ingredients, and the food is still approximately 45 – 65% grains, grain fillers, fibers and grain by-products.
The last 10 years has seen the number of pet food manufacturers grow along with the number of pet food choices that range from completely raw meat diets to Holistic, Organic and even Vegan. Today pet owners are faced with trying to discern what is actually best for their pet. This is continuously made more difficult due to the advertising and claims made by pet food companies that go far beyond stretching the truth.
Pet Food Exposed: Lingering Questions
In the upcoming sections I hope to clarify some of the mysteries of pet nutrition and make it clear to everyone how they should go about deciding what is best for their pet as well as how to determine if what you are doing is truly benefitting your dog or cat.
Today’s Pet Foods – Are they all that they could or should be?
Today’s commercially prepared pet foods often defy common sense and may even contradict nutritional science. Outside of a few metabolic similarities to typical omnivores (the conversion of carotene to vitamin A, tryptophan to niacin, cysteine to taurine and linoleate to arachidonate) our canine friends still remain anatomically and physiologically related to their carnivore ancestor the wolf.
In fact, according to all nutritional experts, dogs do not require any carbohydrate at all. As such, they would benefit from higher quantities of higher quality meat sources, less carbohydrate and fiber and more biologically available vitamin and mineral sources in their daily diet.
What’s in your pet’s food bowl?
Some common nutritional facts:
Commercially prepared diets are based on minimal nutritional requirements
Protein / carbohydrate levels are determined by ingredient cost rather than nutritional adequacy
Protein quality of cereal grains and animal by-products (a measurement of essential amino acid availability) is poor
Foods that list meat like chicken, lamb or beef are able to do so by dividing the cereal grain sources into multiple forms…sometimes two or more forms of the same grain i.e. whole ground corn, ground yellow corn, corn meal, corn gluten meal, corn grits in order to place them behind the meat source.
Natural or Holistic brands do not provide anything more natural or holistic than the majority of commercially prepared diets
Extensive cooking often destroys naturally provided vitamin content
Mineral sources in pet foods routinely use oxide or sulfate forms that are poorly absorbed and are not very bioavailable to the dog or cat.
Artificial colors and preservatives are routinely used to enhance appearance and preserve ingredients that easily become rancid
The normal distribution chain for commercial pet food involves a lengthy process of trucking, storage and shelf sitting…fresh takes on a new meaning when it comes to pet foods
The choices you make in selecting which foods to feed your dog are more important than any other in terms of your influence on your pet’s health. But how can these foods not be good for dogs…after all, they are not dying from eating them. Or are they? Many veterinarians feel that they are…they just aren’t dying right away. When you consider that allergies, autoimmune disease and immune deficiency conditions, diseases of major organs and cancer are increasing faster than the general population of dogs…something is wrong. Just because a dog doesn’t exhibit a nutritional deficiency doesn’t mean it is vibrantly healthy.
Today’s foods are not what I would consider “best” for your dog. They often contain more grain than meat – with most of the grain coming from leftover human food and beverage industry scrap. The meat sources aren’t much better either. The bottom line is today’s pet food manufacturers are provided minimum nutritional guidelines and for them to remain competitive from a price standpoint – minimum is what they provide. This is pet food exposed.
How can you tell which foods provide better quality than others?
AAFCO Definitions:
Meat If a dog food ingredient label says lamb, beef, or chicken then, by law, it contains real meat from a sheep, cow, or chicken.
Meat is the clean flesh taken from slaughtered animals and is limited to that part of the striate muscle which is skeletal or that which is found in the tongue, in the diaphragm, in the heart, or in the esophagus; with or without the accompanying and overlying fat and the portions of the skin, sinew, nerve, and blood vessels which normally accompany the flesh.
When it comes to meat, the more specific the ingredient description, the better the quality, i.e. chicken is better than poultry, which indicates a variety of birds: chicken, turkey, ducks, geese etc.
Meat Meal Beef, chicken or lamb meal is the “rendered” product of these meats.
Meat meal is the rendered product from mammal tissues, exclusive of any added blood, hair, hoof, horn, hide trimmings, manure, stomach and rumen contents except in such amounts as may occur unavoidably in good processing practices.
Rendered – The source of materials to be rendered comes from slaughterhouse waste or condemned animals, butcher shop trimmings, expired meat from grocery stores, restaurant grease, and the carcasses of euthanized and dead animals from farms, animal shelters, zoos and veterinarians.
The process of rendering includes removing most of the hide that is salvageable. The animal is then crushed in its entirety – ground up – heated to remove the fats and oils – cooked to remove bacteria – dried and powdered – packaged and sold to be fed back to farm animals or to be included in pet food.
Meat By-Products Meat by-products: are the non-rendered, clean parts, other than meat, derived from slaughtered mammals. It includes, but is not limited to, lungs, spleen, kidneys, brain, livers, blood, bone, partially defatted low temperature fatty tissue, stomachs and intestines freed from their contents.
Pet Food Exposed: Let the Pet Nutrition Truth be Told
Here is what carbohydrates are doing to pet health. Externally we see overweight pets, excessive stool volume, poor hair coat quality and itchy, scratchy skin. Internally, organ systems are fat laden, unhealthy and struggle to function and survive. As we treat our pets for what the veterinary profession considers a higher incidence of disease or the earlier onset of normal age related diseases; few of us, including the veterinary community, trace these pet health problems back to their origin – the diet.
What about natural and organic pet foods? Are they any better at promoting canine wellness? A small amount of improvement may be found in the meat quality and processing, but the carbohydrate amounts remain and in some cases have been set at an even higher level. There is nothing natural or organic about feeding a pet diet with high levels of carbohydrate to a dog or cat.
I also know people who believe that a vegetarian pet diet contains acceptable nutrition for their pet because it fits within their own belief system and lifestyle. This is anthropomorphic reasoning and it is dangerous at best.
The Nature Channel frequently provides stories about wild animals and their eco systems. When natural habitat is removed or the food chain is disrupted animals become stressed and are forced to adapt. How well they adapt determines whether they survive or not.
In-between survival and death are many levels of poor health.
Pet Food Exposed: Raw Diets
A raw diet recreates the way our pet’s ancestors ate in the wild for thousands of years. Dogs and cats are carnivores. Left to their own devices, their typical daily diet, like that of their wild cousins would involve catching and eating another animal. A raw diet returns our pets to this more natural form of nutrition, as if they had hunted and caught their perfect dinner.
When a carnivore eats an herbivore like a rabbit or a deer, the carnivore eats some meat, some bone, some organ meats and a small amount of green vegetation contained in the herbivore’s digestive tract. These ingredients are the four main food groups of a good raw diet.
Fresh, raw meat
Some uncooked bone
Some raw organ meats
Some green vegetation
Why Feed a Raw Food Diet?
More and more professionals in the world of dogs and cats and thousands of concerned pet owners, are advocating a second look at what we feed our animals. There is a growing belief that dogs and cats need a raw, natural diet in order to be healthy and that commercial pet foods cannot supply the nutrients necessary for good health and a long life. An overabundance of the wrong ingredients may serve to satisfy a hungry pet, but they may also contribute to long-term health problems.
Just like us, our pets are what they eat.
And here’s what raw-feeding pet owners around the world see in their raw-fed pets:
Shinier, healthier skin and coats
Cleaner teeth and fresh breath
Better weight control
Improved digestion
Reduction of allergy symptoms
Harder, smaller, less smelly stools
More energy and stamina
Decrease in abnormal hyperactivity
Increased mobility in older animals
Reduced or eliminated need for veterinary dental work
Switching an animal with an existing health problem to a raw diet can often produce an improvement in their conditions. Among healthy animals, a raw diet is likely to help them avoid some of the illnesses that are now becoming common in our companion animals. Regardless of the starting point for your pet, a high-quality raw diet will help promote a long and healthy life.
Are Raw Diets Safe?
For You and Your Family: ANY food product that is not processed, stored or handled properly is a potential health problem. A raw diet is no exception, and because a raw diet is based upon uncooked meats, extra care is required in storage and handling.
Do cat’s benefit from a raw diet?
Yes. The domestic house cat is descended from the jungle cat, and still needs to eat like a wild cat. Both wild and domestic cats are classified as “obligate carnivores”, which means that due to their genetic makeup they must eat the tissue of other animals in order to thrive. Obligate carnivores may eat other foods, such as vegetables, grains, or fruit, but they must eat meat as the main source of their nutrients. And cats, like dogs, do not have any dietary requirement for carbohydrates, so grain-based foods are much less than optimal for them. And since the meat contained in most commercial pet foods is most often from diseased, condemned animals, the nutrition value is questionable. A raw diet made with fresh, approved meats and bones provides cats with healthy, natural nutrition.
It can be difficult to switch a cat’s diet. Unlike dogs, who are usually willing to investigate any potential food source, cats often imprint on the specific smell, taste and texture of the food they are used to eating. So, while a few will immediately appreciate the raw food offered to them, most will look at you as if you are trying to poison them. But with a little patience on your part, your cat will make the transition.
The key to success with these finicky felines is to go very slowly. In some cases, you will mix only a finger-full of raw food into their current diet – just enough to let them get used to the slight smell of the new food in their bowl. Very gradually increase the amount you mix in with their food. Over the course of a month, most will make a full transition, and no longer tolerate anything but raw food.
Rabbit and venison tend to be very popular with cats, as are the poultry items. Organ meats are very important to feed at least a few times a week. And while some cats love vegetables and it’s fine to feed them, they aren’t really necessary.
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