Keeping your pets healthy is probably nearly as important as keeping your family healthy and with the scare of last year’s pet food recall, some of us may be looking into other ways of achieving just that. My previous article (“Keeping Your Pet Healthy”) provides a few tips on feeding your pets in a more natural way. However, if you’re still using the conventional pet food, here are some pieces of information regarding the widely available pet food that raise both nutritional and animal rights issues.
- Meat byproducts—these come from rendering plants, where animals unfit for human consumption (diseased, disabled, dying or euthanized) are sent to be slaughtered. In addition to being nutritionally dubious, this meat poses health risks as it could be contaminated with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), or Mad Cow Disease.
- Sweeteners—such as cane molasses, corn syrup, fructose, sorbitol and sugar may cause obesity, tooth decay, hypoglycemia and allergies. Moreover, pets can become addicted to sweeteners, which would make switching to healthier food quite difficult.
- Propylene glycol—a chemical used to keep semi-moist dry food varieties from drying out has been found to cause cardiovascular depression and coma in animals. Furthermore, propylene glycol is used in antifreeze solutions and hydraulic fluids.
- Grape pomace—an antioxidant made of grape skin, pulp and seed that is added to pet food, which poses a health risk to dogs since grapes are toxic to the canine kind.
- Coloring agents—often added to pet food to hide the gray color of the low quality meats and include coal tar dyes, such as FD&C Blue 2 and Red 40, which are know human carcinogens that have also caused cancers in animals.
- Butylated hydroxysanisole and butylated hydroxytoluene—are preservatives that have shown carcinogenic properties in studies.
- Cellulose, soybean mill run and wheat mill run—fillers that come form either dry wood or byproducts of human food processing and are used by producers of inexpensive pet food brands to add volume to the food. However, they have no nutritional value to animals.
