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by Lyle Hurd, editor
Linda Page, N.D., Ph.D.
Her Journey to Healthy Healing
As a reader of totalhealth I am sure you are committed to nutrition, research the ingredients in the packaged foods and supplements you consume and have a keen interest in providing your pet with the same quality of health you expect for yourself.
The following considerations will be helpful in selecting the most nutritious diet for your pet.
Ingredient Labels Do Not Demonstrate Food Value
Two very different products can have identical ingredient labels. One can be far?superior nutritionally to the other. The reason for this is that regulations only permit standard descriptions of each ingredient. Thus a manufacturer who is trying to create a truly high quality, nutritionally-rich product cannot describe these efforts on the label.
To determine the true value of a commercial product, read the company’s?literature (not product labels) carefully. “Premium,” “super premium,” “generic” and “natural” are marketing slogans. Anyone can make claims. If the company is doing something nutritionally significant, they will have literature that explains it fully. Question, probe and read to be sure the bag is full of nutrition, not marketing.
More Expensive Pet Foods Are Not Necessarily Better
Manufacturers are under no compulsion to charge based upon what the product costs to make. Modern marketing, in fact, causes more to be spent creating the perception of value than actually putting such value in the package. Foods appearing identical on the label may have a 32-fold difference in cost of ingredients but the charge to consumers may be the same. The more inexpensively manufactured product may even have a higher retail price and get it with the power of a large marketing budget.
So, although it is true that a really nutritional food is going to be expensive, it is not also true that an expensive food is necessarily nutritious.
Most Pet Foods Are Not Human Quality Foods
Notice that your pet food label lists such things as cornmeal, or meat and bone meal, or soy milk run, wheat middlings, dairy products and the like. The descriptive words are different than what you would buy in a grocery store because most ingredients are food fractions left over after human food elements have been extracted. Or they may be industry by-products, believed to be unfit for human consumption. The slick portrayal of pet food ingredients in advertisements, as if they were just like what would appear on a Thanksgiving Day table, is misleading.
How can it be argued that meat and bone meal—which is basically all that is left of a cow after most of the good edible organs and meat have been removed from the carcass—is equal to a T-bone steak purchased from the grocery store? Or how can chicken by-product meal alone—heads, feet and intestines—be equal to fresh, whole, store-bought chicken? Not only do manufacturers imply that their foods are human quality but then they caution pet owners against feeding grocery nonprocessed foods. They can do it but you can’t. As much as supplemental grocery store feeding is cautioned against, there must surely be some evidence of damage from this feeding practice. But other than occasional reports of problems brought on by feeding large quantities of cooked bones, or meat only, or liver only, or fish in excess, there is no such evidence. In 17 years of medical practice I did not see one such problem. Of course ridiculous excesses of anything can cause problems. Even oxygen and water can kill if overdosed. But feeding fresh foods, in variety, can cause only health—not disease. If you believe that the natural instincts of your companion animal mean anything, offer some clean, raw liver or meat and observe. Case closed.
Bad Ingredients Must Be Avoided
This depends upon how “bad” is defined. Anything—natural or not—can be toxic (“bad”) in sufficient dose.
Avoiding the endless parade of bogeyman ingredients is fruitless. First there are stories of the dangers of soy, then corn, then by-products, then wheat, ethoxyquin, saponins, fat...and on and on. These stories begin with half-truths, grow to axiomatic law by mere repetition and then are seized upon and legitimized in the form of products by manufacturers who pander to the confused and misled market.
Also, allergy or sensitivity can develop to any “bad” ingredient if fed unrelentingly as in exclusive feeding of processed pet foods. So there is no magic “good” ingredient to be fed at every meal. Everything can be “bad”—but many natural foods fed in variety can be “good” and prevent both toxicity and allergy.
Good nutrition is not the result of the presence or omission of singular ingredients. It springs from foods as close to nature as possible, fed in variety.
My article in the next issue of totalhealth will discuss the benefits of bones and table scraps to your pet’s health.
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