28th Jul 2009
Are All Human-grade Pet Foods Healthy?
The advantage of human-grade pet foods is that human-grade ingredients are usually of higher quality than their feed-grade counterparts, and that some really inferior ingredients such as waste products collected during the production of human foods (e.g., middlings=floorsweeping, peanut hulls) are not included.
But are all human-grade pet foods automatically healthy simply because they only contain human-grade ingredients?
The simple answer to this question is “No, they aren’t.” The reason for this is that that the choice of ingredients determines the healthfulness of the food, even if the ingredients are human-grade. Human-grade foods have succeeded in making us humans sick, and this is the same for pets which eat the wrong human-grade foods.
The easiest way to demonstrate this is to think about human-grade pet foods that contain refined ingredients. Examples of refined ingredients are refined flours (everything not called ‘whole’), meals (e.g., cornmeal), refined grains (e.g., white rice), salt (table salt is refined), sweeteners (‘sugar’ and ‘honey’ other than raw are refined).
When pets eat these refined foods in excess, they run into the same health problems as humans. The most prominent diseases associated with consumption of refined ingredients are obesity, diabetes, arthritis, allergies, etc. These diseases hit us humans in an epidemic-scale wave since food manufacturers started including refined ingredients in human foods.
Human-grade pet foods with refined ingredients have caused similar epidemics in dogs and cats (and other pets for which fewer statistics exist). It is estimated that 25-44% of dogs in the US are clinically obese. There is also evidence of increased disease risk and premature death in overweight cats.
The correlation between refined ingredients and these diseases comes as no surprise to anybody who reads their pet foods label and is somewhat interested in nutrition. Refined ingredients are bad for us humans and our pets, even if the ingredients were grown and processed for human consumption.
Human-grade ingredients which are allergens are a no brainer. How could allergic ingredients be healthful even if they are human-grade? But would you believe it, many human-grade pet foods contain human-grade allergenic ingredients which can make your pet really sick.
Human-grade pet foods that are over-processed with heat are not healthy either as heat destroys many of the nutrients your pet needs to maintain or restore her health.
Fresh raw foods are the most natural food your pet can consume, followed by frozen and gently dehydrated pet foods. I emphasize ‘gently’ dehydrated because low temperature is essential for the preservation of nutrient qualities and quantities during the drying process.
Some consumers may not realize that the term dehydration is not regulated and that the temperatures used to dehydrate pet foods can vary from temperatures that preserve nutrients to high temperatures which come close to temperatures used for baking! Further, some companies claim to dehydrate their pet foods, while some of the ingredients they use have previously been cooked.
Few manufacturers will tell consumers the temperature they use for dehydration, but manufacturers of certified organic products have to disclose also this information to the organic certification agency. Certified organic pet food manufacturers have to make all their records available to an unbiased third-party (an organic certification agency). These records have to remain available for inspection for 5 years and will be fully disclosed to the FDA should any doubts about a company or its products arise. This full disclosure and transparency, in combination with the organic certifier reviewing any product labels, make it highly unlikely that a dehydrated-raw pet food product would be baked rather than really processed at low temperatures.
If you have listened just a little, you can imagine that ingredients derived from factory-farmed animals cannot be healthful, even if animals are raised for human consumption. These animals are often kept in conditions which do not allow their normal natural behaviors, are fed foods which have little to do with their natural diet, and are medicated to increase their growth or to prevent diseases that may arise in overcrowded, stress-full, or filthy environments. This life-long stress and low quality of care impacts the quality of any product derived from them.
I hope that these few examples have demonstrated that not all human-grade pet foods are automatically healthy. For the choice of a truly healthy human-grade pet food it is essential to know the properties of the ingredients and how they were really processed.
