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. Does the health of a product depend on its ingredients? No, it's 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. In my book The Truth About Pet Foods I mention that approved ingredients include:
Dehydrated waste
Undried processed animal waste
Polyethylene roughage (plastic)
hydrolyzed poultry feathers
Hydrolyzed hair
hydrolyzed leather meal
By-products of poultry hatcheries
meat meal tankage
peanut hulls
Ground almond shells
*Association of American Feed Control Officials Official Publication, 1998
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 would be easy to conclude that reason does not rule when it comes to what officially can or cannot be used in pet foods.
The regulators operate on the simple nutritional concept that food value is based on percentages, and that no ingredient has a special place in the world. 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. Also, they are silent on the negative impact of food processing, and the impact that time, light and heat, oxygen, and packaging have on nutrition and health.
The regulators will not be able to tell you how to feed your pet for their health. For their way of thinking, as long as a packaged food achieves certain percentages, regardless of ingredients, the manufacturer can claim the food is 100% complete. Pet owners then proceed to confidently feed such guaranteed foods at every meal thinking all the while they are doing the right thing for their pet. 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 additional info state that such a diet contains the right percentages of nutrients. If you want to be sick, hospitals are the place to go!