Pet food slogans such as organic, human grade, holistic and natural may increase sales, but miss the point. A new approach is required if pet health is your goal.
Around 25 years ago, I started formulating pet food at a period when the pet food industry was in a muddle and concentrated on things like protein and fat percentages with no regard to ingredients. It was evident that pet food quality is not determined by the percentages of "ideal" pet foods. Boot leather and soap can be used to make pet food. I was convinced then, as I am now, that a food can be no better than the ingredients of which it is composed. This ingredient idea, which has been popularized in the pet food sector, has been given a commercial meaning that has distorted and perverted the meaning of food quality and good feeding practices. Does the health of a product depend on its ingredients? As contradictory as it may seem to what I have just said, no it is not. Here's why.
AAFCO Approval
AAFCO's official publication gives a wide range of ingredients that may be used in animal food. As I have pointed out in my book, The Truth About Pet Foods, approved ingredients can include*:
dehydrated garbage
undried processed animal waste products
polyethylene roughage replacement (plastic)
hydrolyzed poultry feathers
Hydrolyzed hair
hydrolyzed leather meal
poultry hatchery by-product
meat meal tankage
peanut hulls
ground almond shells
*Association of American Feed Control Officials Official Publication, 1998
Simultaneously, this same regulatory agency prohibits the use of many proven beneficial natural ingredients that one can find readily available for human consumption such as bee pollen, glucosamine, L-carnitine, spirulina and many other nutraceuticals. It is easy to assume that the law does not apply when it comes down to what can and cannot be officially used in pet food.
The regulators operate on the simple nutritional concept that food https://www.petdoghk.com/cat-shop.html value is based on percentages, and that no ingredient has a special place in the world. The tens and thousands of scientific articles that prove the importance of the type of ingredient, its quality and how it affects health are denied. Also, they are silent on the negative impact of food processing, and the impact that time, light and heat, oxygen, and packaging have on nutrition and health.
The regulators will not be able to tell you how to feed your pet for their health. According to their thinking, if a food package meets certain percentages regardless of the ingredients, then the manufacturer may claim that the food is 100 percent complete. Pet owners then proceed to confidently feed such guaranteed foods at every meal thinking all the while they are doing the right thing for their pet. Dieticians in hospitals also follow this old-school nutritional philosophy. They feed malnourished patients, who are metabolically deficient, a diet of jello and instant potatoes with powdered egg, white flour rolls, and oleomargarine, because the charts state that such a diet contains the right percentages of nutrients. Hospitals are a good place to go if you want to get sick!