While pet food slogans like organic, human-grade, holistic, and natural might increase sales, they miss the point. If pet health is the objective, a totally new approach is needed.
About 25 years ago I began formulating pet foods at a time when the entire pet food industry seemed quagmire and focused on such things as protein and fat percentages without any real regard for ingredients. Since boot leather and soap could make a pet food with the "ideal" percentages, it was clear that analytical percentages do not end the story about pet food value. 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. Is health reducible to which ingredients a commercial product does or does not have? As contradictory as it may seem to what I have just said, no it is not. Here's why.
AAFCO Approval
The official Publication of the American Association of Feed Control Officials (AAFCO) gives wide latitude for ingredients that can be used in animal foods. As I have pointed out in my book, The Truth About Pet Foods, approved ingredients can include*:
Dehydrated waste
Undried processed animal waste
polyethylene roughage replacement (plastic)
Hydrolyzed feathers of poultry
hydrolyzed hair
Hydrolyzed leather meal
poultry hatchery by-product
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 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.
From the regulators' standpoint, they operate from the simplistic nutritional idea that the value of food has to do with percentages and that there is no special merit to any particular ingredient. 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. They also are silent about the damaging effect of food processing and the impact of time, light, heat, oxygen and packaging on nutritional and health value.
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. 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. If you want 40 gallon tank pet supplies plus to be sick, hospitals are the place to go!