While pet food slogans like organic, human-grade, holistic, and natural might increase sales, they 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. In my book The Truth About Pet Foods I mention that approved ingredients include:
Dehydrated waste
Undried processed animal waste
polyethylene roughage replacement (plastic)
Hydrolyzed feathers of poultry
hydrolyzed hair
hydrolyzed leather meal
By-products of poultry hatcheries
meat meal tankage
peanut hulls
Ground almond shells
(*Association of American Feed Control Officials, 1998 Official Publication)
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 would be easy to conclude that reason does not rule when it comes to what officially can or cannot be used in pet foods.
The regulators operate on the simple nutritional concept that food value is based on percentages, and that no ingredient has a special place in the world. 狗店 電影 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. The pet owners will then confidently feed these guaranteed foods to their pets at each meal, thinking that they are doing what is best for them. This old school nutritional view is standard practice in human hospitals as well where official dieticians feed diseased and metabolically starved patients a fare of jello, instant potatoes, powdered eggs, white flour rolls and oleomargarine because their charts say such diets contain the correct percentages of certain nutrients. If you want to be sick, hospitals are the place to go!