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Why You Should Give Supplements to Your Pet |
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by R. L. Wysong, B.S., D.V.M.
Pet food manufacturers claim 100
percent complete and balanced products.
So why give your pet vitamin,
mineral or other nutritional supplements?
An important advance in nutrition is
the discovery that there is a difference
between overt nutrient deficiencies (rickets,
anemia, blindness, etc.) versus nutrition
necessary to optimize health and prevent a
host of more indirect and chronic degenerative
diseases.
Pet foods that are designed to achieve
“average” levels of nutrition fall short of this
newer knowledge. They are most certainly
not 100 percent complete. Here’s why.
Regulatory feeding trial studies were
designed to assure that pet foods would
not be harmful and would support a
specific life stage. These protocols were
not designed to examine nutritional relationships
to long-term health or disease
prevention or to achieve optimal health.
When researchers set nutrient requirements
they use statistics. They create a bell
curve, which is a statistical distribution to
determine what the requirement would be
for the average majority. If an animal falls
in the middle of the bell curve for every
nutrient (each nutrient has its own bell
curve), all may be well. But each edge of
the bell curve also represents a number of
animals for which the “average” dose is
either too little (creating a deficiency) or
too much (creating possible toxicity).
There is a good chance that a specific
animal (as opposed to a statistical average)
will be on the edges of the curve for at least
one of the nutrients.
For example, thousands of cats have
suffered from a heart disease called dilated
cardiomyopathy. This disease was a direct
result of a deficiency of the amino acid
taurine in the commercial pet foods they
were exclusively fed. No, these were not
cheap, inferior, generic pet foods. They
were premium diets which had been
“proven” to be “100 percent complete and
balanced” through feeding trials, laboratory
analyses and digestibility.
The fact that manufacturers now add
synthetic taurine to diets does not really
solve the underlying logical problem of
reliance on commercial products as
being “100 percent complete.” Contrary to
popular belief, no one knows what “100
percent complete” is.
Taurine deficiency is just the tip of the
iceberg. Other recent discoveries of subtle
nutritional imbalance in “100 percent
complete” pet foods include potassium
deficiency, carnitine deficiency, zinc deficiency,
riboflavin deficiency and chloride
overdose. Not every animal is affected but
subtle deficiencies in many animals cast a
long shadow on their health and cannot be
detected in short-term feeding trials.
Rather they incubate over the lifetime of
the animal to crop up in later years when
little can be done to resolve the problem
or identify the underlying cause—the exclusive
feeding of “100 percent complete”
pet foods.
There is every reason to believe that
many chronic degenerative diseases such as
arthritis, obesity, heart disease, cancer,
immune disorders, allergies and skin, eye
and ear infections can often be related to
chronic malnutrition. For this reason supplementation
may be necessary for pets fed
commercial pet foods—regardless of the
claims of the pet food being fed.
Ideally this supplementation would be
in the form of fresh, raw, whole, natural
foods that mimic the archetypal diet of the
animal. This would include fresh, raw
meats, organs and bones as well as fresh
vegetables and fruits—preferably organic.
In fact, vitamin and mineral supplements
are not necessary for animals (humans
included) that are exclusively eating the
diet to which they are genetically adapted.
However, virtually no one today feeds
their pets a varied diet consisting entirely of
natural, raw foods. Properly designed supplementation
is thus a wise insurance policy
and should include vitamins, chelated
minerals, enzymes, essential fatty acids
(particularly omega-3’s) and probiotics.
Supplements should be food-based
where possible, rather than synthetic.
Vitamins as they exist in nature are in
complex interrelationships with hundreds,
even thousands of other biochemicals within
the complex natural food matrix. It is
this natural matrix which pets are genetically
adapted to recognize and best utilize.
For optimal health emphasize fresh,
whole, raw, natural foods and if supplements
are given, they should be concentrated food
sources of nutrients rather than synthetics
whenever possible.
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