Why are commercial diets so poor? Part II

Why are commercial diets so poor?

Here are some of the reasons:

1.                Cost

• Even premium diets cost about 2 dollars a pound. When we factor in manufacturing, marketing, shipping, packaging, and markup costs for the manufacturer, the wholesaler, and the retailer, the true cost of the basic ingredients is more likely 10-50 cents per pound.
• Reflect on what type of raw ingredients can be purchased for this price.
• Commercial diets are primarily conceived and developed to minimize costs, not maximize nutrition.
• To keep the cost so low, commercial diets have foods in them that have been rejected for human consumption. Even those that refrain from using condemned foods must resort to including foods that are far worse than what people would demand for themselves.

2.                Diets are made to meet minimal standards, not optimal standards.

• Again, due to cost considerations, essential fats, complex carbohydrates, and high-quality digestible proteins are kept to a minimum in the diet.
• Healthy animals can survive on these diets, but over time, there is a price to be paid in deteriorating health and a more rapid aging process for your canine companion.
• Sick animals, and those with a more fragile constitution, require high quality, optimal diets.

3.                Over-processing (i.e., high temperature cooking under pressure) is used to make indigestible foods digestible.

• Food processing plants have known for a very long time that if one wants to feed a food item that is essentially indigestible, the way to do this is to cook the product so excessively that it turns into a soup. Then, by adding grains (again, after extreme cooking methods), one can cook the product once more and turn it into a hard biscuit or kibble.
• Unfortunately, all of the complex compounds we already mentioned as being so essential have disappeared.
• Vitamins are also gone, so the commercial food industry will then spray vitamins mixed with oils (which have likewise been destroyed) onto the resulting hard kibble at the end of the processing. The vitamins are often synthetic, and the minerals are often poorly digestible at best. An example is zinc oxide and ferrous oxide, forms of zinc and iron supplementation that are often preferred by the food industry because they are so cheap (they are, in reality, rust). But they are very poorly absorbed, making them almost useless to the body.

4.                "Garbage in garbage out," a long-standing truism in the computer world, is just as true in diets: poor quality foods can't become good quality foods, no matter what one tries to do with them.

• To the degree possible, diets should start with the highest quality, most digestible and wholesome food possible, instead of starting with the worst foods and trying to improve them with synthetic vitamins and false claims of being "nutritionally complete".
• This is called the food's "Biological Value".

 Labels and Labeling Requirements

All regulations that control the labels on dog foods are created by AAFCO. AAFCO, as has already been stated, is a group controlled by commercial animal food manufacturers.  It is not surprising to find that there are enough loopholes in labeling requirements to make it completely impossible to know what is in a diet, let alone the quality of the diet. Any manufacturer who wishes can create the marketing image that their product is a "premium diet".

In fact, most of these premium diets are, at best, only marginally better than the average diet, and many of them are conceived entirely as a marketing ploy to sell an average diet with a higher markup, creating higher profit margins.

One example of how easy it is to use subterfuge to create an image of wholesomeness, or using a term popular in the industry, "natural", is in the use of preservatives. Many companies will use standard preservatives such as ethoxyquin; yet not mention this in the ingredient list. This is possible if the company adds the preservatives themselves instead of buying a product that already includes them as a preservative. Making the situation even worse is that it is common to then say on the package, "preserved naturally with Vitamin E". This statement naturally implies that no other chemical preservative is in the product, when in fact the company can make this claim by simply adding a little extra Vitamin E than is required by AAFCO to meet minimal needs. The ethoxyquin can then be purchased in a product such as chicken fat that contains ethoxyquin, and thus that information never needs to be placed on the label!

Dog Food and Dog Cancer Diets

Cancer loves carbs.

Anyway, how do dogs get carbs in the wild? They get a little in their meat and a little in the, well, guts of the meal. This is what they are built for. Protein and fat. Not carbs. Not grains. Not high in potatoes either. But, we need our convenience if we want to try to make their diet more natural for them and easy on us. Simple. Find high quality kibble that is the highest protein and medium fat. I use Taste of the Wild Buffalo and some of their other grain free dry dog foods. It is also a pretty good dog food for a reasonable price and is available at most independent pet stores. To rotate diet I also use Earthborn Holistic Primitive Natural. It is almost same great price and high quality. Other ones are Wellness Core, Zignature, Fromm Grain Free. So far, everything else I find is much more expensive and not much better. The above are grain free, lower in carb than most, and high protein. Lower carbohydrate recipes are often recommended by holistic veterinarians as part of a program for cancer recovery.

Here is a dog food review site I find very helpful to understanding better foods

http://www.dogfoodadvisor.com/dog-food-reviews/taste-of-the-wild-dog-food-dry/ Protein = 38% | Fat = 20%   VERY GOOD

http://www.dogfoodadvisor.com/dog-food-reviews/earthborn-holistic-primitive-natural/ Protein = 42% | Fat = 22%   VERY GOOD  But very heavy on the chicken. So be aware of possible chicken, beef allergy or intolerances in addition to no grains.

Compare this to grocery store bought popular brand
http://www.dogfoodadvisor.com/dog-food-reviews/beneful-dog-food-dry/
Read the whole analysis at the link above. This is what many foods are like. Not Good.
Here is the major ingredients:
"Ingredients: Ground yellow corn, chicken by-product meal, corn gluten meal, whole wheat flour, animal fat preserved with mixed-tocopherols (form of Vitamin E), rice flour, beef, soy flour, sugar, propylene glycol, meat and bone meal, tricalcium phosphate, phosphoric acid, salt, water, animal digest, sorbic acid (a preservative), potassium chloride, dried carrots, dried peas, calcium propionate (a preservative), L-Lysine monohydrochloride, choline chloride, added color (Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Blue 2)"This is what many grocery dog foods are like. Not Good. Look at the all grains, the corn (the first and highest percentage ingredient!! )  and flours, and dyes. This food is also 50% carbohydrate! Ug. Dogs are carnivores. (But adding some cooked veggies can help health.)

Here is Hills Science Diet example first ingredients:
Chicken Meal, Brown Rice, Cracked Pearled Barley, Whole Grain Wheat, Brewers Rice, Whole Grain Sorghum, Soybean Mill Run, Pork Fat, Soybean Meal, Flaxseed, Soybean Oil, Chicken Liver Flavor,
Dogs should not be eating all this grain esp wheat, soy, sorghum.



You need to add real cooked meat to kibble diet.
 Add a fried egg and a handful of cooked ground turkey. Eggs and those frozen 'chubs' of turkey or chicken are really cheap and will up the protein and fat in the bowl. Add a few squirts of fish, coconut, or hemp seed oil from the health food store. Omega 3 oils are healthy for dogs too! It would be in their meals in the wild. Free Range beef is very high in Omega 3. Cancer cannot use fats or protein very well to replicate. Although dogs do not digest raw vegetables very well (they can but not everything gets utilized, it does help give fiber though and carrots clean teeth), they love a few small baby carrots(but careful on the hard  stuff if your dogs palate has been breached by cancer) and it's great for their teeth. I then add a little canned green beans, or yellow wax beans, or raw spinach. I know, dogs don't eat that stuff in the wild. But it does have anti-oxidents, minerals, fiber, and other stuff that helps their immune system and digestion of nutrients.

Carbs make dogs fat. Not meat calories. CANCER LOVES CARBS. Cancer cannot utilize protein or fats very well, but it latches right on to glucose levels created by all the dry dog foods generally high carb content.
Dogs are getting fatter and are getting cancer at higher rates than ever because there is WAY too much carbs and, of course, garbage in their food (why are there dyes in their food?). But I think the carbs might be worse. Look on the back of the package of most dry dogs foods. Forget the ingredients for now, look at the protein and fat content percentages. Add those two together and subtract from 100%. That is the percentage of carbs. Don't you think 40-60% (or more from really cheap kibble) carbs is too high for a dog? Geez. No wonder the manufacturers don't put the carb content on the bags. Dogs get their energy from protein and fats, just like they were built for millenia.

This is what Lucy has been on since April 2011, 2 weeks after biopsy definite diagnosis of adenocarcinoma nasal cancer. She is still in remission with no symptoms of nasal cancer as of 1/2013. No bleeds. No discharge. No bumps. No palate problem.  No eye problem. No appetite problem. No reverse sneezing. No blocked airway of left nostril anymore(though it took 3 months of this and my other protocols and treatments though to get to this point). She used to have some symptoms. No more. Please read all posts to understand all the other stuff you need to do. Not hard. Not expensive. Not hard on the dog.
Update 3/31/2016
Still alive and while not in 100% remission anymore she has had some minimal symptoms for the last year.