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Pet Food Manufacturers Comparison Chart Dairy Ingredients in Pet Foods (Colostrum, Milk, Whey, Cheese, Yogurt) Rationale for Dentatreat™ Rationale For Equine Diet™ and Supplements Probiotic Supplementation Biotic pH- and pH+ Rationale For Nutritious Oils Clinical Veterinary Nutrition Omega-3 Spectrum Dry Vitamin Basics DSM Oxidation: The Unspoken Danger in Processed Pet Foods The Truth About Pet Foods Rationale for Archetype Diets Wyscin and Other Raw Food Safety Innovations at Wysong Wysong's Master Key To Health Does America Owe an Apology to its Pets How to Apologize to Your Pet Welcome - Wysong Pet Health and Nutrition The Safety of Vitamins and Minerals in Pet Foods Vitamin C in Pet Foods Vitamin D in Pet Foods Vitamin K in Pet Foods Salt in Pet Foods Yeast in Pet Foods Methionine in Cat Foods Montmorillonite Clay in Pet Foods Mung Bean Sprouts in Pet Foods Probiotics and Enzymes in Pet Foods Proteinates in Pet Foods The Soy in Pet Foods Myth Taurine in Cat Foods Turmeric in Pet Foods Kelp in Pet Foods Lecithin in Pet Foods Limestone in Pet Foods Meats in Pet Foods Methionine in Pet Foods Enterococcus Faecium in Pet Foods Fish Oil in Pet Foods Flax Seeds in Pet Foods Fruits and Vegetables in Pet Foods Garlic in Pet Foods Poultry (Chicken) Giblets in Pet Foods Grape Seed Extract in Pet Foods Guar Gum in Canned Pet Foods Corn and Soy in Pet Foods Di Calcium Phosphate (DCP) in Pet Foods Digests in Pet Foods Ecklonia Cava in Pet Foods Wysong Pet Food Ingredients Explained Animal Plasma in Pet Foods Artichoke in Pet Foods Aspergillus in Pet Foods Black Pepper in Pet Foods Bugs, Mice and Grass as Pet Food Ingredients Carageenan in Pet Foods Chitin in Pet Foods Citric Acid in Pet Foods 'Real Chicken' in Pet Foods Fluff, Puff, and Smoke in the Pet Food Industry Irritable Bowel Syndrome in Pets Pet Foods and Bird Flu High Protein Pet Foods and Kidney Disease Dog and Cat Urinary Problems Wysong Prevention and Therapy Guide Allergen Free Pet Foods Cold-Processed Canned Pet Food Pet Foods Developed by Vets, Breeders, etc. Grain Free Pet Food Pet Foods Without Added Vitamins and Minerals Tapioca in Pet Food Are Meat By-Products in Pet Foods Bad? Why Feed Any Processed Pet Foods? Animal Testing and Pet Food Feeding Trials Pet Nutrition is a Serious Health Matter Large Breed Puppy Foods Can Pets Consume Raw Bones? Should Pets be Vegetarians? Should Pets be Vegans? Euthanized Pets as a Pet Food Ingredient Rodents as Pet Food Ingredients Rabbit vs. No Rabbit in Pet Foods Breed Specific Pet Foods 22 Pet Food Fallacies GMO Ingredients in Pet Foods Diet Guides for Pet Health Conditions How Important is Caloric Content in Pet Food? The Pet Food Ingredient Game Can Pet Health be Simple? What are the Healthier Grains? Raw Pet Food Deceptions Exposed The 'Food Allergies Are Cured...' Myth The Challenge of Properly Diagnosing Pet Food Ingredient Allergies The 'Don't Feed Your Pet Table Scraps' Myth The 'Don't Feed Your Pet Bones' Myth The 'Exotic Pet Food Ingredients Mean Good Nutrition' Myth Pet Food Toxins Why You Should Not Rely On Pet Food Ranking and Pledges The "Order of Pet Food Ingredients" Myth Should You Feed Raw To Your Pet? The Case Against Raw Frozen Pet Foods Does 'Organic Pet Food' Mean Healthy? Wysong Pet Foods Preservation Methods Why are Wysong Pet Food Bags Small? Reusing Wysong Pet Food Packaging Why Does Wysong Make Formulation And Ingredient Changes? Why Wysong Pet Foods Are Not Always Uniform Wysong Pet Food Can Linings The 100% Complete Pet Food Myth The Real Problem in Pet Feeding Does Your Pet Need a % of Something? How to Rotate Wysong Pet Diets Why Intermittent and Varied Pet Feeding Pet Foods for Both Canine and Feline Combining Raw Foods and Wysong Pet Diets Fresh and Raw Pet Diets Wysong Feeding Recommendations for Finicky Cats How to Use Wysong Human Supplements for Pets Dry Matter Analysis of Wysong Dry Diets Dry Matter Analysis of Wysong Supplements Wysong Pet Foods Processing Methods Dry Matter Analysis of Wysong True Non-Thermal™ Raw and Canned Diets Archetype Diet Differences Archetype Special Features Rx Diet Regulations Pet Inoculant Uses What Wysong Pet Diets to Begin With? How to Transition to Wysong Pet Foods Wysong Pet Foods Feeding Amount Guidelines Wysong Pet Food Quality Control Rationale for Feline Diets Special Wysong Pet Food Features About Wysong Healthy & Holistic Pet Food Wysong as a Holistic Company Comparing Pet Foods Based Upon What Matters How To Choose Healthy Pet Foods Ingredient Sourcing Wysong Media |
The 100% Complete Pet Food MythThe pet food industry has been running in place and causing immeasurable harm to pets for at least 75 years. It presents an egregious example of scientific hubris and commercial irresponsibility. Whether you have pets or not, what follows will underscore and substantiate everything the book has said thus far regarding how wrong society can be on health and nutrition. Only in this case, our wrongness falls upon innocent pet victims.Companion animals were once fed table scraps and also ate whatever they could find or catch in the barn or fields. This was fine until leash laws were enacted and pets became more urbanized and house bound. So pet owners began to seek convenience foods from the grocery store. Alert entrepreneurs in the food processing industry noted this and saw an opportunity to convert waste (much of it still highly nutritious) in the growing human food industry into pet food. These converted scraps proved to be an efficient use of resources otherwise wasted and a convenient solution to keeping the pet"s bowl full. There are now extruded, pelleted, baked, canned, freeze-dried, semi-moist, frozen, lifestage, breed specific, high protein, low protein, natural, holistic, USDA approved, human grade, fortified, anti-allergenic, and disease treatment processed pet food formulas. In a race to create new market niches, profiteers roll out an endless array of purported "special" ingredients, and demonize a growing list of "bad" ingredients. Each manufacturer argues that their food is the best and can offer either unsupported claims playing to myths and public ignorance, or proofs such as analyses (% protein, fat, water, etc.), successful AAFCO (American Association of Feed Control Officials) feeding trials, digestibility studies (how much comes out compared to how much is fed), and testimonials and endorsements. All such claims and proofs constitute a fallacious life support system keeping, as you will see, a very dangerous idea alive. The commercial pet food imbroglio is confusing and frustrating for consumers trying to make conscientious choices. After all, how can pet food A be better than food B, while B is better than A, with each side providing proofs? Rather than get into the confusing debate, most people just go with the flow and swallow current marketing razzle-dazzle. Myth, lore, faith, convention, clever advertising, convenience, trust, and tales of pet food ingredient dos and don"ts have become the basis for pet feeding. But virtually every processed pet food claim intended to lure consumers is found to be deceptive upon close examination. For example, "human grade" ingredients sound good, but virtually all pet food ingredients come from human grade processing facilities. "No by-products" sound good, but the trimmings, organs, and scraps you and I can"t find at a meat counter turn out to be some of the most nutritious elements for pets. "No corn, soy, or wheat" is a common scare tactic but the brands that omit them usually use some other form of starch that is nutritionally inferior. Some brands, in an attempt to scare people into their coffers with a "no-grain" claim, use tapioca for their starch. But that can contain the poison hydrogen cyanide. Some make boasts about being holistic, natural, and the like but are essentially the same as all other brands. The "no preservatives" claim would mean that the nutrients are unprotected from oxidation and would generate toxins worse than the preservatives that have been left out. One brand, implying by its name that it is "raw," lists the raw ingredients it contains after fifty or so ingredients that are heat processed (ingredients must be listed in order of quantity), and below an ingredient that is in the food at one ten-millionth of an ounce in a normal meal. The raw part of the food could be at billionths of an ounce, trillionths, or just a few molecules per twenty-ton truckload. People are easily led and deceived because they tend to believe anything on a label and assume pet feeding is mysterious and needs high tech solutions. Let"s think about this for a moment using the same common sense we would use in choosing our own best foods. Because of the nondescript nature of the mush and nuggets in pet food cans and bags, pet owners must extend a lot of trust to manufacturers. But the balm of blind trust and faith never turns out to be a solution for anything. For example, consider the following approved ingredients from the official AAFCO (American Association of Feed Control Officials) regulatory publications:
The absurdity of official nutrition deepens because at the same time regulators approve dehydrated garbage, they ban natural ingredients like pollen, chondroitin, Coenzyme Q10, and other nutraceuticals (natural substances with health effects). Any health food store and grocery has foods and nutraceuticals approved for humans that are banned from inclusion in commercial pet foods. This sad state of irrationality—approving feces and garbage but banning chondroitin—can only be explained by the fact that regulators are trained in old school nutrition - using textbooks parroting 100-year old nutritional ideas. They are taught and come to believe that the nature of the food makes no difference, just the percentages of protein, fat, vitamin A, and the like. If dehydrated garbage and feces is made sterile (safe?) and has 12% protein, then to them that equals nutritious food. Similar thinking can be found in human hospitals where old school nutritionally trained dieticians feed diseased and starving patients instant potatoes, Jell-O, canned meat, and Diet Coke. Any claim about special merits of natural ingredients is often considered voodoo by them. Both human and animal nutritionists can be so caught up in their science of percentages that no room is left in their brains for common sense. If that"s the way they want to eat, that is one thing. It"s quite another for consumers to follow along just because nutritionists and regulators promote themselves as expert, authoritative, and immune from error. In a classic case of government run amok, regulators carefully purge the industry of natural ingredients that may have health benefits, and then call manufacturers to task over picayune matters on package labels that have nothing to do with nutrition, health, or safety. Here is just one example of how regulators fill their time policing pet foods - A commercial food that had chicken and beef in it claimed on the label that it had "meat." The regulatory Gestapo swooped down and declared it illegal. They considered neither chicken nor organs to be "meat" because of a terminology technicality they had created. It took thousands of dollars and months of work for the manufacturer to make the changes to the packages. For what? So the public would not be "misled" to believe that the "meat" mentioned on the label was chicken and organs (even though the ingredient label clearly identified what was in the product). This was an action taken by the FDA, the same regulatory body that permits drugs into the market that maim and kill hundreds of thousands of humans and animals every year. In contrast, never has the word meat on a label harmed a pet. And most certainly no pet has ever been harmed if their owner understood meat to be chicken and organs. Pet food regulators busy themselves refereeing precise label verbiage, size of print, where on packages certain things must be said, and work to promote the disease-producing "100% complete and balanced" pet food label claim (I will get into in a moment). They are stuck in their own deep bureaucracy, oblivious to the real world, and convinced of their self-importance by monitoring silly nonsense. In the meantime, against such a massive background of agreement among industry, regulators, medical professionals, and nutritionists, how could the public help but be bamboozled into thinking that pet food manufacturing is some sort of high tech wizardry their pets need? Yes, processors can soup-up their twin-screw extruders and make things like white flour, textured soy vegetable protein (TVP), dye, and flavoring look and taste like a real pork chop. But the best of technology is being used to fool owners and pets and to make profits, not to create truly healthy pet foods. The results speak for themselves. After countless generations on the new fangled diets, pets are plagued with every manner of modern degenerative disease, including obesity, cancer, dental disease, et al that plague humans and their companion animals on their fare of processed foods. The tragedy is greater for pets because people can at least choose foods for themselves; pets can"t. Even though people may think they are being smart by relying on the pet expert industry, stop and think about this for a moment. Nobody in their right mind would ever eat the same processed food, meal after meal, day after day for a lifetime. Nobody would make his or her child eat the same processed food at every meal. So why on earth would we ever think of doing it to our pets? Yet virtually every pet owner feeds the same processed food, meal after meal, day after day, and does so thinking they are doing their pet a favor because the label says "100% complete and balanced." Recognizing this contradiction and using the same intuitive sense to feed our pets as we do ourselves is the key to healthy pet feeding. Aside from the fact that the singular feeding of processed foods spawns illness and disease, it is a cruelty to force a captive animal to eat the same food at every meal. Try eating a bowl of dry Captain Crunch as the only food at every meal for the next 15-20 years, the lifetime of pets. Or eat a can of Spam at every meal for the same time. The exclusive feeding of processed pet foods takes advantage of people"s desire for convenience and their unwillingness to trust themselves or take personal responsibility. As for the pet industry perpetrators, it all began innocently and well intentioned enough. Entrepreneurship is the American way. All pet food producers needed to do was convince the public to throw their "non-nutritious and imbalanced" table scraps in the garbage, and to feed their pet the new modern way. But heat-processed, starch-based pet foods had all sorts of nutritional imbalances and deficiencies. Pets were dying, developing rickets, and going blind, just like starving children do in a third world country. To save the day, regulators stepped in to force manufacturers to "balance" the pet foods better. So manufacturers consulted nutritionists who hold the belief that almost any mix of base ingredients can be made whole by adding protein from virtually any source along with synthetic vitamins and minerals. (The recent massive pet food recall of products containing an ingredient that was evidently spiked with toxic melamine to boost its nitrogen percentage—interpreted as protein—is an example of the danger of a focus on percentages.) They "fortified" and "balanced" the foods so they would meet the "known" standards. To prove that the resulting foods are wholesome and healthy they decided to devise an experiment, known as the AAFCO feeding trial. This is an example of something called science that is not that at all. Since it is not an experiment worth doing, it is not worth doing well. It goes like this: If after a few weeks of eating the specific diet to be proven, the caged experimental animals don"t die or show signs of deficiency, toxicity, or sickness, then the pet food passes. The manufacturer can then claim "100% Complete and Balanced" on the label. Monitoring this claim and making sure manufacturers meet the standards surrounding its presentation on labels is pretty much the central focus of pet food regulation: the FDA, USDA, AAFCO and every state feed control agency. With a passed AAFCO test certificate in hand, the manufacturer can tell everyone that their new "scientifically proven" food is all that a pet owner should feed and if they feed anything else nutritional imbalance and disease may result. If the manufacturer flashes scientific looking graphs and charts in front of veterinarians, some of them might endorse the products as well. (Veterinarians, like physicians, get little if any nutritional education. What they do get comes primarily from the biased "100% complete" pet food industry.) By performing such testing all was supposed to be well and science served. But as it turns out, the claim of "100% complete" is a pretense of science because it assumes that which cannot be true - 100% complete knowledge. Nutritionists, caught up in their cognitive chauvinism about percentages, totally miss the fact that nutrition has long-range impact that cannot be measured in a several-week AAFCO feeding test. Measuring such things as body weight, general condition, and a few blood values only gives the process the flavor of science, not its substance. They forget that prisoners have been known to survive for years on little more than water and a little rice or bread that is deficient and imbalanced by every nutritional measure. They overlook the body"s ability to adapt to and tolerate all kinds of nutritional abuses - for a time. Their so-called proof of a food"s perfect completeness is a mockery of logic, evidence, and science. The commercial gambit of claiming 100% completeness is nothing new. It was also attempted in the baby formula industry. After all kinds of assurances that scientifically designed baby formulas were the "100% complete" smart choice for modern moms, the breast was retired to its "proper" place as a cosmetic appendage. Physicians were indoctrinated by industry propaganda to push baby formula as the new, advanced, modern way. Then disaster struck. Hundreds of thousands of babies suffered serious nutritional diseases. When the breast was brought out of retirement, health was restored. Surely with such a terrible lesson, food processors would not again try to supplant nature. But they have, and on a grand, worldwide scale. With clever subterfuge the pet food industry—under the tutelage of official nutritionists and regulators—is doing exactly the same thing the baby formula industry did. The difference is that it is now illegal for mothers to be told that baby formula is better than natural food (in this case, breast milk), or that formulas should be fed exclusively. Why? Formula can cause disease and death. But the lesson learned has not been transferred to pet feeding. The "100% complete" claim is now the bread and butter of a multibillion-dollar pet food industry and pays the salaries of countless nutritionists and pet food regulators. The scam has caused disease and death from its beginning, but it continues unabated while regulators harass manufacturers about how to place words on package labels. Think about it. Our world is complex beyond comprehension. It is not only largely unknown, it is unknowable in the "complete" sense. In order for nutritionists and manufacturers to produce a "100% complete and balanced" pet food, they must first know 100% about nutrition. But nutrition is most certainly not a completed science. In fact, although nutrition is rapidly being developed as a science, it has always lagged behind the other sciences. This is in part because it is a field of study that has not stood side by side with the other sciences in universities. Rather, nutrition has more or less been considered an incidental branch of homemaking or some other applied field such as animal husbandry. Additionally, because of its almost infinite complexity, the science of nutrition is not easily developed. The fact of the matter is that the "100% complete" claim is actually 100% complete guesswork. At best, one could say that such a claim is the firm possibility of a definite maybe. |