It All Starts With Food
(Chapter Three from The Nature of Animal Healing, by Martin Goldstein, D.V.M.)
Beside my computer right now is a 13.2-ounce can of Ken-L Ration Grand Recipe dog food with “homestyle chunks in sauce”. I chose it at random this morning at the local supermarket, along with a few other kinds of dog and cat food that we’ll get to in a minute. Have you ever stopped to read the ingredients on the food you give your pet? Let’s give it a whirl with Ken-L Ration, as common a brand as you can find.
The first ingredient listed for any food as you may know, is the weightiest one. The first ingredient in Grand Recipe is “water sufficient for processing”. Just how much water are we talking about here? The answer appears on another part of the label called “guaranteed analysis”: moisture is listed as constituting 82.0 percent of the contents. So a good part of this can will simply be passed by your dog as urine or will serve to dilute the potency of his stomach’s acids needed to help digest the meat. Hearty chunks indeed!
The second ingredient is “poultry by-products”. Uh-oh. “Poultry by-products” are not simply the parts of the chicken you’d rather leave on the platter as it goes around the family dinner table. According to the Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO), an independent group that issues guidelines approved by the Food and Drug Administration, poultry by-products “must consist of non-rendered clean parts of carcasses of slaughtered poultry such as heads, feet, viscera, free from fecal content and foreign matter except in such trace amounts as might occur unavoidably in good factory practice.” So this product may include chicken heads and feet, and viscera — an inclusive term that refers not only to intestines but to any internal organs, such as the heart and lungs, thorax and abdomen. I don’t know whether any of those parts might be in this or any other can of Grand Recipe; the can label does not specify the nature of the poultry by-products included, nor is it required to do so. But the term is hardly cause for celebration. The reference to fecal matter in the AAFCO guidelines sounds more reassuring until I start to wonder how even a slaughterhouse determined to observe “good factory practices” could remove all or even any of the fecal matter from each of the thousands of chickens being slaughtered and processed at its plant each day. (Now there would be a job!) And what about that other assurance, that the by-products must consist of “non-rendered clean parts of the carcass.” Just what is rendering anyway?
More on that below.
Next on the ingredient list of Grand Recipe we come to soybean meal. Sounds vaguely healthy, doesn’t it? Sort of…vegetarian? Not remotely. Soybeans are not easily digestible by dogs, so much of their protein is wasted, especially when they’re exposed to high heat and processing, as nearly all pet foods are. Worse, certain breeds tend to be allergic to soy protein, including Akitas, Dobermans, German shepherds, and Labrador retrievers. “Soybean meal”, however, isn’t even straight soybeans. After most of the oil — the part that’s somewhat beneficial for people, if not for pets — is removed from the soybeans, the husks that remain are ground up as “soybean meal”.
Wheat flour, the third ingredient in Grand Recipe, might seem less disconcerting than soybean meal. In itself it’s not a problem. Unfortunately, AAFCO allows wheat flower to include “the tail of the mill”, a quaint phrase that means anything swept up from the wheat mill floor at the end of the week.
Finally, with the fourth ingredient, we get substance: meat. Here at last are those hearty chunks, in whatever modest percentage of Grand Recipe that remains after water, by-products, and meal. Thought about that word “meat”: What does it mean? According to AAFCO, meat can be derived from any skeletal muscle of any slaughtered animal. It can come from the tongue, diaphragm, heart, or esophagus, and it can include fat or skin. “If it bears a name descriptive of its kind,” AAFCO’s guideline goes on to say of meat, “it must correspond thereto.”
Since the Ken-L Ration label does not specify which kind of meat is contained in Grand Recipe, your guess is as good as mine. For that matter, your guess is as good as AAFCO’s, because this group’s only job is to declare what should be stated on pet food labels. Each state has an agricultural department or office of state chemist that may enforce AAFCO guidelines — or not. The FDA helps AAFCO draft its guidelines, but does nothing to enforce them. Indeed, the FDA takes no action on pet food matters unless a claim is made on a label that may be fraudulent, such as that a cat food may help feline lower urinary tract disease when it does no such thing. There is, in other words, no federal agency that polices the pet food industry at all, and at best a patchwork of state regulators who may, from time to time, make inquiries. Unfortunately for your dog or cat, the pet food industry pretty much regulates itself.
In 1983, the Hills company, a large pet food producer, waged an advertising campaign to show how much better its brand was than the competition. To help make its point, it produced an ad that showed how you could produce a blend of shoe soles, coal, and crankcase oil that would meet AAFCO’s minimum requirements for protein, fiber, fat, and other nutrients. We tend to assume that pet foods have improved in quality over time: after all, the packaging on most brands is better than it used to be, with reassuring buzz phrases like “complete nutritional diet” and “scientifically proven”. Unfortunately, no one who’s made an effort to analyze pet food in recent years from outside the industry and government has been able to determine that the products are any better than they ever were. An investigative report by the Animal Protection Institute of America, a national nonprofit animal advocacy organization, is both impressive in its scholarship and utterly depressing in its conclusions. A book by Ann Martin titled Foods Pets Die For is even more damning.
For starters, let’s consider the basic appeal of almost any pet food: meat or fish. We like to think that commercial brands contain at least some decent cuts of one or the other. The truth is they contain none. Any cuts fit for human consumption are consumed by humans: they’re too valuable not to be. Only the heads, feet, and various organs are set aside for pet food. And that’s the best of what’s in commercial pet food.
Fish parts, at least, are free of hormones, drugs, and disease — thought they may contain high levels of mercury or some other toxin that makes them unfit for human consumption. More troubling, however, is the livestock fated to end up as pet food.
The poisoning of pet food meat begins with the hormones fed to livestock to make them grow faster, so they can be slaughtered that much sooner. People who eat hormone-fattened meat are, in my opinion, taking a certain health risk. But at least they’re eating choice cuts, and their diets are varied. Pets who eat hormone-injected, ground-up and process meat by-products every day are definitely at greater risk. As Richard and Susan Pitcairn observe in Dr. Pitcairn’s Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs and Cats, laboratory animals have developed cancers when fed proportionately as many hormones as livestock is.
The daily feed of livestock is also laced with “maintenance doses” of antibiotics intended to prevent disease. As likely, these drugs instill toxicity that increases cancer risks, both in the livestock and the pets that feed on processed meat. Industry guidelines direct farmers to wean their livestock from antibiotics thirty days before slaughter; ostensibly, that’s enough time for the antibiotics to work their way out of the animals’ systems. But is it? My own sense is that it’s unlikely a powerful antibiotic will be flushed out entirely in that time. And again, a pet fed the same diet of antibiotic-laced substandard meat every day is at far greater risk of cancer than a person eating choice cuts on an occasional basis.
These guidelines, such as they are, ignore a whole other category of livestock: the direly sick animals who collapse from one disease or another and, as a result, never reach the slaughterhouse. These animals are deemed unfit for human consumption, killed, and sent off to “rendering” plants which supply meat protein used in pet food.
Nine years ago, as a result of her own dogs’ illness, Ann Martin found herself thrust into an investigation she’d never considered pursuing: determining the role that rendering plants play in the composition of pet food. Her book Foods Pets Die For is to the pet food industry what Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is to the petrochemical industry. In her native Ontario, Martin discovered that rendering — at its best, the boiling of any animal substances discarded by slaughterhouses as unfit for human consumption — is an established, if little-publicized industry, and that “rendered” animal substances go directly into livestock and pet feed. These substances may include “4-D” meat: meat from dead animals, dying animals, and diseased and disabled animals. (To that I add a fifth D for “drugged.”) These 4-D carcasses may have cancerous tumours, worm-infested organs, and the like — basically, anything and everything goes into the pot. Worse, Martin found, rendering plants happily accept roadkill, dead zoo animals, and, most appallingly, euthanized pets from animal shelters and veterinary clinics.
Shocked by the standards she found in Canada, Martin sent a questionnaire to the state governments of all fifty of the United States, asking, among other things, if state laws allow euthanized pets to be rendered, and if rendered material is freely used for livestock and pet feed. Twenty states replied blithely that no laws forbid the rendering of euthanized pets or their use in pet food. The remaining thirty states did not reply, suggesting their standards are just as lax. “Finding companion pets eating dead cats and dogs objectionable is more than just aesthetics,” Martin writes. “Safety is at stake.”
Indeed it is, since most pets are euthanized with sodium pentobarbital, which medical authorities acknowledge may be dangerous or deadly, even absorbed indirectly after some days or weeks, by healthy cats and dogs. Just how significant is this unpublicized aspect of the commercial pet food chain? Martin found that the main rendering plant in Quebec was rendering 11 tons of dogs and cats per week. On March 11, 1997, the New York Times reported that the city of Los Angeles sends two hundred tons of euthanized cats and dogs to a company called West Coast Rendering every month. Most veterinarians Martin spoke with had no idea that the pets they euthanized were ending up at rendering plants; they assumed that the services they paid to remove the animals were cremating them. When Martin explained the situation, all switched to a reputable cremater. In other parts of Canada, however, and throughout the United States, the rendering continues, apparently without the awareness of nearly any veterinarians.
A couple of years ago, the Los Angeles Times ran a story about the sad fate of two circus elephants so maltreated that they died of tuberculosis during the circus’s run. The story was tragic, but so, too, was the following detail mentioned in passing about one of the elephants: “Workers used a forklift to put the animal’s body on a truck for transport to the San Bernardino State Diagnostic Lab. A necropsy showed that 80 percent of Joyce’s lung tissue was infected either with cancer or tuberculosis. The body was taken to a rendering factory to be processed into animal food.”
As bad or worse than the “meat” in many pet foods are the chemicals used to make the “meat” look and taste fresh. Not until after my brother and I had stopped feeding Leigh [our dog] Gaines Burgers did we learn that of all the dog foods, the “semi-moist” kinds may be the worst in this regard. To keep them looking fresh and moist, manufacturers use chemicals called humectants and emulsifiers. The most common — and most notorious — in this class is propylene glycol, a compound whose molecular structure is nearly identical to that of ethylene glycol, which is antifreeze. Though propylene glycol is harder to find on ingredient labels than it used to be, all “semi-moist” foods are loaded with sugar and various preservatives to keep them moist in their plastic wrapping for literally years.
Take Purina’s Moist & Meaty, another brand I picked up this morning at the supermarket. Dogs love the “chopped burgers,” declares the package, because “real beef is our #1 ingredient.” Beef is listed first — whatever “beef” means to Purina — so that it is, ostensibly, the heaviest ingredient in the recipe. But look at what’s second: high-fructose corn syrup. Corn syrup is not only useless to pets, it’s actually harmful, overstimulating the production of insulin and potentially causing diabetes or other diseases. The “burgers” loaded with it are sickeningly sweet, and have nothing to do with the ground chuck we associate with the words “burgers”. Perhaps Purina should advertise these “chopped burgers” as Moist & Meaty Sugar Burgers!
Let’s look at one other dog food I bought this morning: Ken-L Ration’s Gravy Train. Dry “kibbles” are reputed to have more protein than either semi-moist “burgers” or canned “wet” food. The moisture content of Gravy Train, for starters, is “not more than 10 percent,” which sounds impressive: the remaining 90 percent, one would guess, must contain protein. In fact, we can determine exactly how much protein this remaining “dry weight” contains by a simple equation. All we have to do is divide the dry weight into the “crude protein” figure listed in the same place on the label. When we do that, it turns out that our can of Grand Recipe, despite its high water content, actually has more “crude protein” than Gravy Train. So the canned food actually beats the kibble! But remember, “crude protein” may contain such ingredients as chicken feathers and beaks. The “crude protein” constitutes some, if not most, of the protein. So all you’re getting is more of what you didn’t want in the first place. Lose-lose.
Cat food, too, appears as kibble or “wet” food (also as clear-packaged semi-moist chow, in the case of Tender Vittles, though the word “burgers” is omitted because, presumably, it sounds unfeline) and contains many of the same dubious ingredients: digests, by-products, and meals. On a can of Friskies “mixed grill formula” I bought this morning along with those other tasty provisions is the especially unimpressive mention of bonemeal. What bones? What meal? Who knows? AAFCO’s guidelines define “meat and bonemeal” as “the rendered product from animal tissues, including bone, exclusive of any added blood, hair, hoof, horn, hide trimmings, manure, stomach and rumen contents, except in such amounts as may occur unavoidably in good processing practices.” As Ann Martin observes, however, even this modest requirement seems unlikely to be met at the rendering plant. How easy is it for a renderer, after all, to remove those offending parts from every animal he throws into the pot? In fact, Martin’s investigation led her to believe not only that whole pets are rendered but that some of their collars and tags are thrown in, too!
Pet owners who do read ingredient labels will probably find some reassurance from the many vitamins listed after the main ingredients on nearly any pet food label. Ken-L Ration’s Grand Recipe, for example, includes “vitamin E supplement, niacin supplement, vitamin A supplement, riboflavin supplement, vitamin B12 supplement, and vitamin D3 supplement.” The other brands on my desk contain the same or similar ingredients. Why “supplements”? Because Grand Recipe’s “hearty chunks” of dubious no-name meat, once cooked at high temperatures, have such little nutritional value that vitamins must be added to provide the overall minimum level of nutrition requested by AAFCO. A premix of these vitamins adds up to 130 percent of the established minimum daily requirements to compensate for the loss incurred by the heating process. But while a food analysis will show an ample or excess amount on the label as a result, these vitamins are then cooked at high temperatures, so their quality is, to say the least, diminished.
The roll call of ingredients of all mainstream pet foods ends in a jumble of nearly unpronounceable chemicals used as preservatives, and a smattering of colours with numbers. Packaged food for people has preservatives too, of course, but not, for example, propyl gallate, which some doctors believe causes liver damage. Sodium carboxymethyl-cellulose is an edible plastic filler that used to be put in thick shakes at some fast-food franchises to make them thicker, until the FDA outlawed it — for human consumption. It’s still in some pet foods, along with ingredients like cellulose gum and guar gum — all used to bind beak bits, ground bones, and other ingredients into chunks, “burgers”, or kibble. BHA and BHT are still almost universally used; both are suspected carcinogens. (Foods for eople contain BHA and BHT too, but in minute quantities; and again, people don’t eat the same food at every meal.) One of my favourites is potassium sorbate, a preservative used to preserve the things that weren’t preserved before they went in! And then, on my package of Purina Moist & Meaty, is ethoxyquin, currently the most notorious preservative of the bunch.
Ethoxyquin, also used in many “better brand” foods, was concocted in the 1950’s by Monsanto, originally as a rubber stabilizer. It is, in fact, the major preservative in tires, keeping the rubber in them from oxidizing. As a synthetic antioxidant, it works the same magic in food, too, keeping fats from turning rancid so that the food is more or less edible forever. It’s used in most farm feeds, especially for poultry, which is to say that people, not just pets, absorb it. But only in pet foods is it used directly. And as the Animal Protection Institute of America (APIA) observes in a recent investigative report on pet foods, ethoxyquin has been associated with a staggering array of medical complications, including infertility, neonatal illness and death, skin and hair coat problems, immune disorders, thyroid, pancreas, and liver dysfunction, and behavioural disorders. I know of three academic studies — by researchers in Australia, Norway, and Mexico — that found strong links between ethoxyquin and various ill effects in laboratory rats or chickens, including significant degradation of livers and kidneys. Bad stuff. Moreover, as the APIA observes, ethoxyquin need only be listed on a label if the pet food manufacturer was the one who put it in the product. When it enters the pet food chain at the slaughterhouse or rendering plant, it need not be listed. And over the years, its use has increased.
“The FDA kept allowing more usage in pet foods because it was more concerned about the animals that were part of the human food chain,” the report states. Now neither the FDA nor the consumer has the means to measure whether even those lower standards are being met. “There is absolutely no way of knowing if the pet food companies are complying with the law or not.”
Also near the bottom of most pet food ingredient lists are a number of colours, usually accompanied by numbers. These, of course, are artificial dyes. Ken-L Ration’s Grand Recipe has Red 3, Purina’s Moist & Meaty has Red 40, while Ken-L Ration’s Gravy Train sweeps the derby with Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Red 40, and Blue 2 — what a beautiful pageant! Unfortunately, all are inorganic and toxic. Since neither dogs nor cats perceive colour nearly as well as we do, why do the pet food makers bother? To impress you! After all, you wouldn’t buy Moist & Meaty if it looked naturally grey rather than sirloin-fresh red.
Synthetic flavourings, on the other hand, are only for pets. Phosphoric acid, for one, tingles animals’ tongues and so acts as an artificial appetite stimulator, especially in cats. Beef digest, poultry digest, salt, and sugar are all also used to perk up tasteless food. Barely a nutrient among them.
Imagine waking up in the morning and coming down to the kitchen to make yourself breakfast. You take some soybean grits, mix them with some tainted cattle-meat meal, throw in a few beaks and feathers, then sprinkle on a few preservatives and dyes. Pressure-cook the hell out of it, then let it cool — and dig in!
What if you were told that this is exactly what yo8u’d eat at every meal for the rest of your life? Is it any wonder our pets have degenerative diseases? That so many get cancer? That so many die before their time?
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I’d love to think that my argument is so persuasive that every last person reading this book will stop buying prepackaged pet food today and start cooking [fresh foods] for his pets. I’m good, but I’m not that good. Some owners do lead lives so busy or stressful that they cannot coordinate a real-food diet for their pets. And some owners, as much as they love their pets, simply aren’t going to be bothered. Fortunately for them (and their pets), a number of excellent prepackaged pet foods have come on the market in recent years.
The new prepackaged foods are mostly produced by small companies. (One can only assume that the large pet food companies have chosen not to produce healthy products because good food costs more.) They’re hard to find at supermarkets, though some of the sleeker new markets carry them. And if you live in or near even a small American city, you may be within driving distance of one of the natural pet food stores that have sprung up in the last few years, or the good pet foods and related pet health-care products now available at most health food stores — cheering signs that the lousy major-brand fare may not dominate the market forever.
This may come as a surprise, but the good new choices I’m alluding to here do not include several brands promoted aggressively in recent years as ideal pet foods. Iams and Science Diet, to name just two, may be better than some brands, but they’re not nearly as noble as their packaging suggests. Iams’ Original Formula for cats claims on its front side to contain “high quality chicken”, yet lists as its first, chief ingredient “chicken by-product meal.” Though “chicken” is the second ingredient listed, several by-products, digests, and meals follow. Science Diet’s dog food for large breeds includes front-of-package claims that it “promotes healthy skin & coat,” and “builds strong bones and teeth,” yet its first ingredients, in the order of which they appear, are: “Ground corn, poultry by-product meal, corn gluten meal, dried beet pulp, animal fat…” And what does this brand of Science Diet add to preserve its animal fat? Ethoxyquin.
The better new brands tell you without qualification which kind of meat they contain, for starters. Here’s how Innova’s ingredient for dog food begins: “Turkey, chicken, chicken meal, whole ground barley, whole ground brown rice, whole steamed potatoes, ground white rice…” Doesn’t that sound like food you could eat? “Whole raw apples…whole steamed carrots, cottage cheese, sunflower oil, alfalfa sprouts, whole eggs, whole clove garlic…” I’m getting hungry just typing the list out! In both its dog and cat food brands, Innova also includes natural probiotics that promote good health, including acidophilus, and vitamins E, C, and A, as well as selenium, zinc, and manganese, all good antioxidants. And what it doesn’t have is just as crucial: no artificial colours or preservatives. Dr. Wendell O. Belfield, a prominent holistic veterinarian, helped Innova shape its recipes and product lines, including California Natural, as did one of his most respected colleagues, Dr. Larry Chaulk. Now this is pet food.
On my short list of other first-rate brands, I include Solid Gold, Natural Life, Wysong’s, Cornucopia, Precise, PetGuard, and Abady. All use chunks of real meat, lots of whole (not processed) grains, essential vitamins and minerals, and no preservatives.
One final note on mealtimes. Every day, beside the bowl of food, you also put down a bowl of water. Chances are, it’s tap water.
Worrying about the ill effects of tap water in the US might seem more a preoccupation for Chicken Little than for the rest of us. Unless we’re in restaurants where the waiters intimidate us into buying bottles of Pellegrino, many of us drink tap water without any seeming harm. New York tap water, indeed, is reputedly as clean and sparkling as any water in the world. Why worry about it for our pets?
Unfortunately, our faith in tap water is direly misplaced. I call it the silent killer, and by that I mean for pets and people. No matter how pure the mountain stream and how clean the reservoir, by the time tap water reaches your sink, it’s filled with chemicals like Strontium 90, and heavy metals like lead and cadmium, the products not only of groundwater pollution here and there but of the pervasive pollution by acid rain. In the Smith Ridge office, before I had a water filtration system, I steam-distilled several gallons of water for our own and our patients’ consumption — only to be shocked by the result the next morning upon cleaning the distiller: brown sludge. Now imagine that residue collecting over time in your pet’s body. The results may include arthritis, spondylosis, and cancer.
At the risk of sounding paranoid, I have to add that the milk you give your cat is likely no better than the tap water you give your dog. The biological function of cow’s milk is, after all, to help turn a calf into a heifer, which means putting several hundred pounds on the animal in its first six months of life. So cow’s milk is chock-full of natural growth hormones, protein, and food factors to accomplish that. In both cats and dogs, this overabundance of proteins can react badly with proteins in the body, bringing on allergies or asthma.
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All information copyright The Nature of Animal Healing, by Dr. Martin Goldstein, D.V.M., published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1999. New York.
Dr. Martin Goldstein earned both his B.S. and D.V.M. from Cornell University in 1973. He was certified in veterinary acupuncture by the International Veterinary Acupuncture Society in 1977, and iridology in 1981. He continues to receive advanced education credits yearly by attending the American Holistic Veterinary Medical Society’s annual conferences, where he also frequently lectures. Dr. Goldstein has written numerous articles about holistic veterinary medicine and alternative therapies for many magazines, journals, and related publications. He teaches the seminar, “Fundamentals of Health and Disease from an Alternative Point of View”, to both veterinarians and members of the general public. The seminar, six hours long and illustrated by four hundred slides, is the culmination of over two decades of his research and work in the field of alternative veterinary medicine.
