You Are What You Eat

Cleanliness and good food go a very long way to cutting down disease. A creature that is well fed and kept in clean surroundings has, in my opinion, an eighty per cent better chance of escaping disease, or, if it contracts a disease, of recovering. Unfortunately, a great many people (including, I am afraid, some zoos) still suffer from the extraordinary delusion that anything edible but not fit for human consumption is ideal for animals. When you consider that, in the wild state, most animals – unless they are natural carrion feeders – always eat the freshest of food…it is scarcely to be wondered at when they sicken and die if fed on a diet that is ‘not fit for human consumption’.”

Paco and Pedro were the first dogs I ever owned. So when the breeder told me to buy Purina ONE for them to eat, I went to Petco and looked for it. I couldn’t find it, so I bought Purina Puppy Chow. On Purina’s website, Puppy Chow is hyped as “the perfect puppy food in every way. Our nutritionists have designed Puppy Chow® to contain proper amounts of protein, vitamins, minerals – all of the things a growing puppy needs. That foundation will help bring out the best in your puppy.”

Hey, I wanted what was best for our puppies. But just in case, I went to another pet supply store and also got Purina ONE. This food, the website explained, was “made with high-quality ingredients including real meat, fish or poultry, and you can be sure your pets will love the taste!”

If real meat, fish or poultry was in Purina ONE, then what the heck was in the Puppy Chow? It didn’t seem to make much of a difference because when I brought both bags home, Paco and Pedro hated both of them equally.

Since those early days, I’ve learned that most commercial dog food contains meat by-products deemed unfit for human consumption. I didn’t feel comfortable giving food to my dogs made of ingredients I wouldn’t eat, so after the first month or two, I gave them kibble made with only human-grade ingredients. But even if you don’t feel squeamish about giving your dogs food you’d never touch, consider this: what goes in, is what comes out.

A better quality food helps a dog obtain its energy requirements in a more digestible form. In other words, it generally takes fewer good-quality kibbles than low-quality kibbles for a dog to be full, and less of each kibble going to waste. What does this mean for you? You get to pick up poop in a more compact form: nicely formed, firm poop that won’t fall apart as you’re trying to scoop it up. (Keep in mind that if you switch foods, it’s better to do it gradually over a week or two by mixing the old kibble with an increasing percentage of new kibble, to decrease stomach upsets and diarrhea. So if you switch to a new food and your dog has diarrhea, don’t blame it on the new food until your dog’s had time to adjust to it!)

But what’s a better quality food? Every bag of kibble nowadays seems to proclaim “your dog will love it!” “highly nutritious!” and “recommended by the AAFCO!”

Until I read Food Pets Die For and Protect Your Pet by Ann N. Martin, I didn’t realize that no government agency actually regulates what goes into pet food, and that there is a vast difference between food fit for humans and food fit for pets, and no one to care if food fit for neither happens to fall into the latter category.

Martin’s research relied primarily on her personal research and communications with various agencies, so I decided to look into this myself. I started with Massachusetts’s regulations on pet food. Apparently no one in Massachusetts cared too much about these regulations though, because none of the links worked as of this writing.

With some judicious editing of their links, I managed to find the correct page. As Martin had suggested, Massachusetts had no requirements for the quality of the ingredients. In fact, Massachusetts seemed primarily concerned with the labeling on dog food packages, and not with what was inside. So much for state legislature.

I broadened my search and looked for federal regulations. I found that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has a Center for Veterinary Medicine that “is responsible for the regulation of animal drugs, medicated feeds, food additives and feed ingredients, including pet foods.”

No one here seemed to care about pet food, either, because when I clicked on the link for pet foods, I found a statement saying “see new page developed last year – petfoods.doc” without any links or further explanation of where this mysterious petfoods.doc was located.

I did find some general information by looking at animal feeds. The FDA apparently “cooperates with the Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO) and the States for the implementation of uniform policies for regulating the use of animal feed products. This includes the establishment of uniform feed ingredient definitions and proper labeling to assure the safe use of feeds. The ingredient definitions are important because animal feeds and feed ingredients must be correctly and truthfully labeled when they enter commerce.”

Okay. So like Massachusetts state law, it was important to the Feds that things be labeled correctly. But still no one had said anything about requiring the actual ingredients to be of a certain quality.

Then came the shocker. “Although FDA has the responsibility for regulating the use of animal feed products, the ultimate responsibility for the production of safe and effective animal feed products lies with the manufacturers and distributors of the products.”

Whoa, nelly! So the FDA is responsible, but the people who are MORE responsible are…the ones who stand to make billions of money from the sale of pet food? People who, say, might be able to increase their take-home profits by skimping on little things like, say, ingredients?

Going back to my Purina dilemma three years ago, I now set out to determine what was actually in those bags of food that P and P wouldn’t touch. The Puppy Chow sounded more suspicious, so I started with that one. The ingredient list was as follows.

INGREDIENTS: Ground yellow corn, chicken by-product meal, corn gluten meal, brewers rice, soybean meal, beef tallow preserved with mixed-tocopherols (source of Vitamin E), pearled barley, animal digest, dicalcium phosphate, calcium carbonate, salt, potassium chloride, L-Lysine monohydrochloride, choline chloride, DL-Methionine, zinc sulfate, ferrous sulfate, vitamin supplements (A, E, B-12, D-3), manganese sulfate, niacin, calcium pantothenate, brewers dried yeast, riboflavin supplement, biotin, garlic oil, pyridoxine hydrochloride, copper sulfate, thiamine mononitrate, folic acid, menadione sodium bisulfite complex (source of Vitamin K activity), calcium iodate, sodium selenite.

Hmm. There sure seemed to be a lot of scientific stuff on that list, and not too much actual food that I recognized. According to the FDA/CVM, “All ingredients are required to be listed in order of predominance by weight. The weights of ingredients are determined as they are added in the formulation, including their inherent water content.” So whatever was first on the list, was the heaviest in weight.

The FDA/CVM wasn’t too helpful after that, though it did say that “Most ingredients on pet food labels have a corresponding definition in the AAFCO Official Publication.” So off I went to the Association of American Feed Control Officials to get an explanation of the ingredients.

The AAFCO website didn’t seem to want to list their actual ingredient definitions, unless I gave them $50 for the Official Publication, so I had to go with the definitions provided in Martin’s book, which she obtained from the 1994 AAFCO Official Publication, and also this list of AAFCO ingredients.

Well, it didn’t sound so bad. But Martin’s book pointed out that the type of meat used in these dog foods are typically “4-D” animals: those that are dead, diseased, disabled, or dying prior to slaughter. The FDA’s regulations on these 4-D animals state only that they can not be used for human consumption, and that any facility preparing carcasses “which are not intended for use as human food” are not required to be inspected by the Federal Meat Inspection Act. So an animal dead of a cancerous tumor would still be considered appropriate protein for pet food. And the actual tumor? Munch, munch…hope your dog likes it.

Worse, the group of animals that are brought to the rendering plants can contain someone else’s pet dog or cat. It’s not illegal to render pets, and animals that are euthanized in shelters or in veterinary clinics or hospitals can end up in these plants. Pet food companies might try to avoid buying from plants that render cat and dogs, but as of 1997 and according to Martin, only two small pet food manufacturers had ever signed up for the US Department of Agriculture’s special inspection service to guarantee that dog and cat corpses were not contained in their food.

Even if you don’t care if you have a cannibalistic dog, perhaps you should worry about sodium pentobarbital, which is used to euthanize animals. The FDA/CVM released their study on sodium pentobarbital in March 2002, with this list of dog foods that they tested. Over half the foods tested showed the presence of sodium pentobarbital, but the FDA also stated that they did not find DNA of euthanized cats and dogs in pet food, and thus assumed the sodium pentobarbital was from euthanized cattle and other animals. (See Ann N. Martin’s take on this.)

Sodium pentobarbital persists in animal tissues even after rendering, and the American Veterinary Medical Association states that animals (dog, cat, or other) killed by these types of euthanasia are not recommended for ingestion by other animals or humans (see page 685 in their 2000 Report on Euthanasia). Too bad the AVMA doesn’t have any say in what goes into animal food.

And with the vast amounts of animal matter that gets rendered in factories, what factory is going to actually stop and remove feathers, hair, horns, teeth, and hooves from every single dead animal that passes through its machines? No one is regulating these rendering factories, because these are where animals you don’t care about end up.

The protein in Purina ONE–you remember, the dog food with “high-quality ingredients” was no better. Sure, it had “real fish or poultry” in it (with no explanation of whether this was human-grade fish/poultry, or if it contained 4-D fish/poultry), but it also had corn gluten meal and poultry by-product meal. Ick.

Most other brands of commercial dog food, from Pedigree and Alpo to fancier ones like Nutro and Eukanuba/Iams, contain these 4-D animals, even food which proudly screams “no by-products.”

Alternatives to this disgusting stuff? We’ve been feeding Wellness for a year now. The ingredients include: Deboned Chicken (which is defined as “edible portion of deboned chicken meat, certified by USDA as fit for human consumption”), Ground Barley, Oatmeal, Rye Flour, Menhaden Fishmeal, Whitefish, Ground Brown Rice, Ground Millet, Canola Oil (preserved with Rosemary, Vitamin C & E), Flax Seed, Amaranth, Dried Peas, Dried Carrots, Whole Sweet Potatoes, Whole Apples, Whole Blueberries, Whole Clove Garlic.

We also used to feed Innova, which is just as good. And you can also feed raw (BARF) or cooked human food. As far as the difference between canned and dry food, good quality kibble and good quality canned food are usually available from the same manufacturer. Some vets say canned food contributes to plaque buildup on teeth, but others say dental problems depend more upon the ingredients of the food, rather than the form (canned or dry).

Let’s face it, some dogs have lived to a long, healthy age without ever tasting anything other than supermarket pet food. But there are some humans who are lifelong smokers, and live to a ripe old age too. Do you want to leave your dog’s health up to chance and genetics?

Note: On September 29, 2002, the author of the books mentioned above, Ann N. Martin, contacted me via email. She said:

Just read your article “You Are What You Eat,” and it is great. By the way, I’m Ann Martin and you might be interested to know that I am still waiting for the information, under the FOIA, which I requested from the FDA/CVM back in March.

I had asked for any and all documentation relating to the testing they did on the food which they said showed that dogs and cats were not contained in the product. I’ve contacted them three times since my original request and they refuse to reply. Makes you wonder what is going on.

Also, I have contacted three forensic labs and all have stated that it would be virtually impossible to detect any dog and cat DNA in a product that had been rendered and then processed.

The revised edition of my first book, “Food Pets Die For:” will be out the first of November and there are things that are even more shocking including the research these pet food companies do, or research they fund at universities, where dogs and cats are literally tortured and/or killed so these companies can find the cheapest ingredients they can use in their products.

As I mentioned, great site and you have really done your homework.

Sincerely,
Ann

Additional information:
Premium Food by 4GSD. What to look for in a food, and a list of top ten foods.

Food Not Fit For a Pet by Dr. Wendell O. Belfield
What’s Really in Pet Food by the Animal Protection Institute
The Whole(istic) Truth About Pet Food by Christie Keith