May I suggest that you read the attached about grain-free dog food. Tufts University Veterinary Nutritionists are amongst the most respected Veterinary Nutritionists in the country, and they are expert in grain-free food induced low taurine levels and Dilated Cardiomyopathy.
Also, if you are interested in pet nutrition, the Tufts Veterinary Nutritionists publish a superb (free!) blog, and will send you email when they publish something useful. The blog/website is called "Petfoodology," and it is published by the Clinical Nutrition Service at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University.
You can sign up for complimentary, Petfoodology email, here (top right side of the page):
http://vetnutrition.tufts.edu/petfoodology/
Thanks for the article. It seems like a good scholarly text, but I have some real concerns with way they present the information and their recommendations.
Personally, I suggest you do educate yourselves, talk to your vet and be suspicious about anyone who tells you to 'trust big industry.'
That goes for timeshares, investing, food and just about anything else.
We DO feed a 'grain free' diet; meaning no corn or wheat.
We use a relatively 'main stream' manufacturer that has had no serious recall history
We supplement with cooked meat (raw is to difficult to remain sanitary) and this includes organ meat
We blend 'flavors' of kibble to reduce the risk of formulaic contamination and batch contamination
We supplement our dogs diets with fish oil, additional glucosamine and chondoitin and vit c/d-mannose cranberry for one (UTI's)
First, the conclusion that pet owners should "... stop reading the ingredient list!" and "be careful about currently available pet food rating websites" and "The best way to select what is really the best food for your pet is to ensure the manufacturer has excellent nutritional expertise and rigorous quality control standards" is pretty much an advertisement for the largest mainstream pet food manufacturers. This is something I have a real problem with---these are the people that got us where we were 20 years ago. So, we should just buy 'regular' dog food from the biggest manufacturers and quit reading the labels or trying the discern the best brands? Hogwash.
Second, what pushed the pet food industry into the gutter (the slaughterhouse and cereal factory gutter) was the never-ending search for profit and volume over quality and health. The claim about 'don't read the label...' is true in some aspects: Manufacturers crack or split the ingredients on the labels for marketing purposes. "The first three ingredients are meat!" is such an example. Yes, meat, meat by-products and meat-meal are all 'meat.' But, that doesn't tell you much. Part of the problem is that meat-meal (beef-meal, turkey-meal etc..) is composed of the wide range of ingredients that can be boiled, pulled, pulverized, ground or liquefied from an animal carcass. This includes all parts of the animal...including many parts that we won't talk about. In order to sterilize this material and render it suitable for food, the meal is exposed to very high temperatures to sterilize it. This process removes taurine and the precursors for taurine. Effectively, the 'meat' is now deficient for the dog/cat diet. As noted below, other forms of meat (lamb and others are also naturally now) can not provide enough taurine or precursors.
Finally, some things that were mysteriously absent from the article above. I didn't see any discussion of the correlation between high-fiber ingredients (beet pulp for one) and taurine insufficiency. It's a ongoing research subject, but appears to have significant relevance to the issue discussed. Next, the author says, and I quote "...grains do
not contribute to any health problems and are used in pet food as a nutritious source of protein, vitamins, and minerals." Ok, I'll buy that. But, let me ask you this? Do the major pet-food manufacturers use 'grains' in their pet food, or do they use grain by-products procured cheaply from the waste products of human food manufacturing? Ding Ding. The by-products of High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) are widely used as 'grains' in pet food. Ditto for the by-products of cereal manufacturing and more. These products have very little food value and are NOT a source of high quality protein for pets. They do raise the overall protein analysis on the ingredients label. They do not contain taurine or the precursors. Also, some of these 'grains' have been procured from very dubious sources (foreign) and have contained contaminants and poisons. Remember the Chinese melamine baby food incident? It's been found in pet food as well.
I agree. Improper diets are bad for pets. Small pet-food manufacturers should be carefully researched before use. Fad diets are bad (for anyone). But really, use your brain when feeding your pet. Below is an excerpt from a pet food site. It is designed to encourage you to buy their food....but the facts are there.
Why
NOT to feed 'grocery store' pet food....
The answer lies in a part of the history of pet food that the big manufacturers
don’t want you to know.
Before WWII, more than 90% of commercial pet food came in cans, and contained mostly meat. However, metal was needed for the military, and by the time the war ended, 85% of pet food was dry kibble. It still contained a good amount of meat, and this is what prevented taurine deficiencies from occurring.
The primary machinery for producing what is familiar to us today as dry food is called an extruder; it was introduced in the 1950s. However, to get the right crunchy texture, the recipe called for a higher proportion of starch. This started the trend of ever-increasing quantities of cereal grain, such as corn, in dry foods. At the same time, meat processors were getting more proficient at getting more meat from livestock carcasses. Less meat was available (and what was available was getting more expensive), so pet food makers substituted other animal tissues leftover from slaughter, officially called “by-products.” Over time, the result was a high-grain, low-meat dry food, for which the profit margin was—conveniently—much higher than for canned food.
"Taurine is found primarily in muscle meat, and is completely absent in cereal grains. The lack of taurine in the diet caused serious eye and heart diseases to develop."
Unfortunately, cats were about to pay for the pet food companies’ profits with their lives. With virtually no muscle meat in even the premium dry foods of that period, cats eating that food were missing crucial taurine, and suffered the consequences of corporate greed as sickness, blindness, and death.
When studies fingering taurine deficiency as the cause of these ailments were published, pet food manufacturers hastened to supplement taurine in their diets. Curiously, because bacteria in the cat’s digestive system evidently prefer canned food to dry, they needed to put three times more taurine in canned food than dry. The problem disappeared, and everyone lived happily ever after…or did they?
Because dogs make their own taurine from other amino acids, it’s been thought that they didn’t need such supplements. But in the last few years, researchers have discovered that a few dogs evidently can’t supply their own taurine needs; at least not on a diet of cereal grains and by-products. Certain lines of spaniels, retrievers, and particularly Newfoundlands developed the same form of heart disease that was killing cats. Now, this disease is actually pretty common among dogs of all breeds, but what was interesting about these particular dogs was that supplementing taurine could reverse their heart disease. As it turned out, many of these dogs were eating lamb and rice dog foods. Lamb meat has a relatively low level of taurine compared to chicken, the most common pet food protein. (Beef, venison, and rabbit are also much lower in taurine than poultry.) Consequently, a few pet food makers have started to supplement taurine in some (but not all) their dry dog foods.
However, the basic reason remains the same for dogs as cats: there isn’t enough real meat in the food to sustain a meat-eating predator like a dog or cat. The vast majority of dry pet foods out there contain little or no real meat, but instead use cheaper substitutes like grain proteins (corn gluten, wheat gluten, soy protein), and by-products such as meat and bone meal.
