Food: A Few Myths To Bust
Get Beyond The Marketing When Choosing Pet Food
Are you a label reader? Or are you a grabber – taking something off the shelf to purchase because of color, sales price sticker or some other visual? How do you choose your pet’s food? It’s not a simple thing anymore – there are close to 5,000 different labels for dog and cat foods.
There are obviously the big name corporate pet food manufacturers, as well as regional brands on down to the local manufacturer. So what is best for your particular pet or pets? The simplistic answer is, feed the best quality food that fits your personal criteria that your pet or pets like to eat and that fits in to your budget. Meaning – it’s a free for all. But there are a few myths to bust and guidelines to set that may help guide your choices.
Most consumers select their pet food with the thought that the product has been scientifically developed by their brand of choice. This is not necessarily true.
Many pet food lines use “co-packing” – meaning they provide their exclusive recipe for a food product to a manufacturing facility that may do the same for several other brands. For example, Diamond Pet Foods has several production facilities. Along with their own labels of food Diamond and Diamond Natural, the company also produces food for the following: 4Health, Apex, Chicken Soup, Kirkland, Natural Balance (dry), Nature’s Domain, Solid Gold and Taste of the Wild.
Another producer, Simmons, makes canned foods for Blue Buffalo, Canidae, Castor Pollux, Life’s Abundance, Nature’s Logic, Ol’ Roy, Dogswell, Evolve, Petcurean and Nature’s Variety.
This is does not mean the diets have issues, but can mean 1) shared ingredients – if a supply is contaminated or has issues, then multiple food lines can be compromised and 2) no scientific testing or feeding trials – nutrient values are established through bench chemistry testing, not feeding trials.
Do dogs and cats need to eat a Paleo menu exclusively? No. Carbohydrates have a place in all animals’ diets to provide quick energy and also provide certain essential nutrients, including protein, fat, fiber and vitamins. Corn and other grains are processed to ensure that the body gets the highest biologic value of the ingredient along with adding fatty acids, amino acids and other nutrients. A better way to look at grains and carbs in your pets’ diets is that no one ingredient exclusively provides all the nutrition needed by the body.
Grain free is best? Wrong. Grains are not commonly allergenic and our animal patients do not have celiac disease. The Grain Free designation is merely a marketing tool as there is no nutritional research to show that grains elicit an inappropriate response from the immune system.
Boarded veterinary nutritionist Ann Wortinger sums it up best, “My primary recommendation would be to look at nutrients rather than ingredients in food. The body does not care if the meat is chicken, beef or reindeer; what it cares about is the amino acids included in the food. The body does not care whether the fat is animal or plant-based, but whether all the essential fatty acids are present. Look at nutrients, no marketing.”
Dr. Margot can be reached at parkhillvet.com