Expensive Pet Foods Aren’t Much Healthier Than Cheap Ones
The pet food aisles are full of packages claiming to contain “natural” and “whole” foods, with fresh vegetables and fried chicken on the front. But there isn’t much difference between these foods and the cheapest by-product chunks. Here’s what you can expect from your pet food.
What does “chicken” actually mean?
Both dogs and cats love to eat meat, and their wild cousins happily hunt smaller creatures, often with organs and everything else. Thus, pet foods usually need to contain a large amount of animal tissue. But if you fancy a filet mignon or even those pieces of lean chicken and salmon that adorn the labels on the packaging, you are thinking differently from your pet.
“If you buy commercial pet food at all, you’re buying ingredients that people don’t want to eat,” write Marion Nestlé and Malden Nesheim in Feed Your Pet Right , an excellent read if you want to know what is actually included. composition of food for your pet. This does not mean that there is something wrong with what we feed our pets – after 300 pages of analysis, they concluded that all commercial foods are mostly good – but most meat ingredients are something you will never see. at the grocery store.
Take beef, for example. The American Food Control Officials’ Association defines it as “pure flesh obtained from slaughtered mammals and limited to that part of the striatus muscle that is skeletal, or that part that is on the tongue, in the diaphragm, in the heart or in the heart.” esophagus; with or without the accompanying and overlying fat and areas of skin, tendons, nerves and blood vessels that usually accompany the flesh. ” A bird has a similar definition, but may include minced bone.
There is no need to slaughter food animals just to prepare pet food, as there is a lot of waste in the meat industry that you and I are not interested in buying. So if chicken is the number one ingredient in your dog food, you are probably getting a gruel of meat, skin and cartilage that has beenmechanically separated from the remaining chicken necks and backs. It is satisfying and delicious if you are a dog. If you’re curious, but not overly scrupulous, this video shows how the process works:
Here are a few more meat-related terms that you are likely to see on pet food labels:
- By-products include clean parts of slaughtered animals that are edible to animals but are not considered meat. These include the lungs, spleen, kidneys, brain, liver, blood, bones, and fat. In the case of poultry, by-products may include heads and legs.
- Dishes such as chicken meal or fish meal are offered . This means that manufacturers take the edible parts (meat or offal), cook and dry them into powder.
What else is there besides meat?
Many pet food brands boast meat (or something like “chicken”) as their number one ingredient. This is fine, but no matter how the ingredients are ordered, there are almost always grains, vegetables, and other ingredients such as vitamins and minerals.
How much meat is in the product, you can tell by the phrase on the package. AAFCO sets minimum percentages for any meat advertised on the label:
- “100% chicken” literally means: a meal made entirely of chicken. (This is rare, but remember, again, this could include mechanically deboned chicken slurry.)
- Chicken dog food should be at least 95 percent chicken, or 70 percent if it is wet food (since water is a fraction of the weight of the food).
- The chicken recipe assumes that chicken is part of the meal, but there are other ingredients as well. To use this formulation, food must be at least 25 percent chicken (or 10 percent if wet).
- “Made from real chicken” means it must contain at least 3% chicken.
- Chicken flavor doesn’t require a minimum amount of chicken as long as it’s on the ingredient list somewhere. It’s the same with “meaty” – you can use this word for any pet food that contains meat. Sometimes these flavoring ingredients are sprayed onto the outside of the piece.
If moist food seems like an easy way to fix this problem because it looks like cuts of meat, think again. Nestlé and Nesheim write:
Canned food for pets usually starts with relatively low-grade meat trimmings that turn into chunks that look like chunks of meat. This requires suspending meat particles in gels, heating them to chunks, or using extruded vegetable protein to simulate meat. Some premium or super premium foods contain real cuts of meat, but many do not.
In practice, salt makes up about one percent of pet food. Thus, whatever comes after salt on the list is only present in trace amounts. This is sometimes the case with the fruits and vegetables depicted on the labels.
In their book, Nestlé and Nesheim were able to eliminate some of the things that are not found in pet food. For example, none of the byproducts include hair, horns, teeth, or hooves. And despite the rumors, you won’t find shavings, motor oil, or old boots in pet food either. (The books define an ingredient for “hydrolyzed leather flour” that can be made by boiling and processing leather trimmings, but no one uses it; Nestlé and Nesheim write that they “doubt that feed control officials will allow this.”
On the other hand, they tried to track what was happening to dogs and cats that were euthanized at shelters and found that they sometimes end up in the same processing plants that supply pet food ingredients. Traces of euthanasia drugs were found in pet food samples, but at very low concentrations. This does not seem to be a widespread practice, but it is worrying that neither Nestle and Nesheim nor Snopes have been able to confirm or deny whether this happens from time to time.
Are non-meat ingredients a problem?
Nutritionally, pets need vitamins and other nutrients that come from unappetizing places such as the organs of carnivorous animals and the contents of the stomach. Cats and dogs have also adapted to collect food from our plates and garbage dumps, so it makes sense that their diets will not be the same as their wild counterparts. But should they really eat grains and vegetables every day?
Although grain is not fashionable for humans and pets these days, there is nothing wrong with it. Dogs and cats can digest grains, and they are an excellent ingredient in food if the nutrients are balanced. In other words, it is fair to use the “if it fits your macros” approach, and grains often fit just fine.
There are two small caveats. First, barley and soy make dogs fart a lot. Another is that the more fiber a food contains – be it grains, vegetables, or small amounts of fillers like carrageenan and guar gum – the more poop your dog will produce. More expensive “premium” products tend to result in less feces.
So let’s say you find a grain-free food that you like. That’s okay, but you’re paying extra for meals that are nutritionally similar to cheaper grains. Grain-free foods may not contain wheat or corn, and instead usually contain pea flour, potatoes, and other starchy ingredients. If the food is nutritiously complete – and this will be indicated on the packaging – you should probably save money.
What about other encouraging words on the label? Most of them don’t mean what you think. The definition of “natural” is so vague that it doesn’t make much sense. There is no official definition of “whole”, and while “organic” has a special meaning in human food, there are loopholes in pet food laws that allow foods to be called organic that do not meet all organic standards. “Human level” is another meaningless buzzword. Some foods and treats use it, but AAFCO finds its usual use to be misleading . Pet food is not what you feed yourself to, and that’s okay – your dog doesn’t mind.
Update on 08/30/2017 09:40 PM: A previous version of this post said there is no definition of “natural”; this is no longer the case. We also clarified AAFCO’s position on the “human level”.