Friday, April 29, 2011

All Natural Dog Food - Scraps And Byproducts.

James Morris and Quinton Rogers, professors with Department of Molecular Biosciences at the University of California at Davis Veterinary School of Medicine, assert that there is virtually no information on the bioavailability of nutrients for companion animals in many of the common dietary ingredients used in pet foods.Moldy grains.The amount of nutrition provided by meat byproducts, meals, and digests varies from vat to vat of this animal protein soup.Says Plechner, Food processing refuse of all sorts winds up in your animals dinner bowls.Both make a profit from selling scraps that originate from places far worse than the dinner table.

All Natural Dog Food - Ingredients are listed in descending order of weight (heaviest first) under standards established by the Center for Veterinary Medicine for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).Byproduct are animal parts leftover after the meat has been stripped from the bone.Rancid foods.The name of the product (in most states) is dictated by the regulations of the American Association of Feed Control Officials (AAFCO).Meat byproducts, the catch-all term of the pet food industry, is a misnomer because these byproducts contain little if any meat.From a business standpoint, multi-national food companies owning pet food manufacturers is an ideal relationship.The Pet Food Institute, the trade association of pet food manufacturers, acknowledges in its 1994 Fact Sheet the importance of using byproducts in pet foods as additional income for processors and farmers.They are processed straightaway for companion animal consumption.These are food animals picked up dead, or that are dying, diseased, or disabled, and do not meet human-food qualifications.The trouble is, AAFCO standards can lead to deceptive product names due to the weight and volume variations between wet and dry ingredients.A vat filled with chicken feet, beaks, and viscera is going to make available a lower amount of protein than a vat of breast meat.A similar fate applies to so-called 4-D animals.In his 1986 book Pet Allergies veterinarian Al Plechner sums up what goes into companion animals food: Condemned parts and animals rejected for human consumption are routinely rerouted for commercial pet foods.Whatever remains of the carcass (bones, blood, pus, intestines, ligaments, subcutaneous fat, hooves, horns, beaks, and any other parts not normally consumed by humans) is, according to the pet food industry, perfectly fit as a protein source for cat and dog food.It is not happenstance that four of the top five major pet food companies in the United States are subsidiaries of major multinational food production companies: Colgate Palmolive (which produces Hills Science Diet), Heinz, Nestle, and Mars )see The Corporate Connection).A decade later, his words still apply.What the consumer purchases and what the manufacturer advertises are often two entirely different products, and this difference threatens the animals healthy, especially as they age.

All Natural Dog Food - Little goes to waste.Many of these remnants are indigestible and provide a questionable source of nutrition.Also, the average consumer has no idea what the definitions for the listed ingredients mean.The purchase and use of these ingredients by the pet food industry not only provides nutritional foods for pets at reasonable costs, but provides an important source of income to American farmers and processors of meat, poultry, and seafood products for human consumption.The multinationals have captive market in which to dump their waste products, and the pet food manufacturers have a direct source of bulk materials.What the pet food manufactures fail to mention is that most byproducts, digests and meals are also filled with other substances, such as cancerous tissue cut from the carcass, plastic foam packaging containing spoiled meat from supermarkets, ear tags, spoiled slaughterhouse meat, road kill, and pieces of downer animals.Chicken byproducts include heads, feet, entrails, lungs, spleens, kidneys, brains, livers, stomachs, noses, blood, and intestines free of their contents.These ingredients are generally byproducts of the meat, poultry and fishing industries, with the potential for wide variation in nutrient composition.For years, many care givers have tried to avoid feeding their companion animals people food leftovers, having been warned by veterinarians about the heath problems they can cause.Yet much scrap material from the human food industry is ending up in dogs and cats dinner bowls.Claims of nutritional adequacy of pet foods based on the current AAFCO nutrient allowances (profiles) do not give assurances of nutritional adequacy and will not until ingredients are analyzed and bioavailability values are incorporated.The latter is ground-up slaughterhouse discards often containing disease-ridden tissue and high levels of hormones and pesticides, the very things that may have contributed to the death of the steer or hog.Byproducts contain little if any meat.Learning to read ingredient labels and taking the time to read them carefully is crucial to making an educated choice when purchasing pet food.Preservatives, vitamins, minerals, flavorings, and cereal make up most of what the companion animal eats.When cattle, swine, chickens, lambs, or other animals meet their ends at a slaughterhouse, the choice cuts -- lean muscle tissue and organs prized by humans -- are trimmed away from the carcass for human consumption.
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