Why Diet Matters

Well, for the same reason it does for us – you are, what you eat !
Your food is the fuel for your body, and to operate at optimum levels, the correct food needs to go in. Many of us have grown up in times where we’ve never known dogs to be fed anything but food from sacks, boxes or tins from shops. Unfortunately what we haven’t realised, is that these foods have a number of problem areas for our pets;
1. There is no regulation of pet food, anyone could start up a petfood business tomorrow and put whatever they like in their petfood, and there is no organisation to make sure they don’t lie or mislead on the label, and to make sure everything  is even on the label…only trading standards ‘if’ they know about the company and visit……so words like chicken ‘meal’ or lamb ‘meal’ are used – and that can mean anything from ground up feet, beaks, feathers to all the parts of the animals which cannot be used for anything else – not fresh choice prime cuts full of goodness like we see in the picture on the label……
We also assume where the protein is listed, that it all comes from the meat, but wood is protein, and things like melamine can also be used to boost protein levels even though they are not digestible and donot provide bio-available nutrients for dogs or cats – as too many have found to their peril in previous years, suffering kidney damage and even kidney failure and death before pet foods manufactured in China with melamine added to boost protein levels were recalled.

2. Because there is no regulation, the quality of ingredients used in petfoods is very poor, and after it is all cooked up, synthetic nutrients have to be added because there is virtually no goodness left in the food otherwise – these synthetic nutrients are not the biologically optimum kinds for our dogs bodies, so are hard for their body to utilise.
It is also unknown exactly where, (as these things are very hard to find out) but it is a known fact that in some countries euthanised pets, and roadkill are all ‘added to the pot’, sometimes with collars intact, and are all cooked up together – infact, petfoods have been tested and found to contain levels of pentobarbitol, which is the same chemical substance injected into animals when killing them, and this happens in developed countries, not just poor countries….

3. Petfood manufacturers make foods suitable for Omnivores, that is, animals which naturally eat a diet of meat or fish, fruit and veg, and carbohydrates – like us. The trouble here, is that cats and dogs are NOT Omnivores, they are Carnivores, and dogs have ‘adapted’ a little to also scavenge, but Not evolved, so are still essentially Carnivores, and the problem that poses is that they do not even have the right enzymes produced in their body to break down cell walls of vegetables. They can benefit from some fruit and veg if it is prepared in such a way to be bio-available to them, but otherwise this leads to behaviour problems, health problems and extra, unusual wear and tear on vital organs in the body.
 
4. There is a lot of sugar added to petfood, which of course is not good for our pets – in fact, our dogs eating commercial petfood, is like us living on fast food, and even though we may think it tastes nice, we know there is not much nutrition it in. It doesn’t provide the basic range of nutrition needed for healthy cells, healthy organs and overall good health.

5. There are additives added to petfood, and unfortunately many of them are known to cause cancer, indeed, they’ve already been banned from the human food chain for this very reason, but are still widely used in manufactured petfood.

6. The nutritional balancing in petfood is all wrong, because they are making petfood for omnivores, but any canine course will tell you they are classified, as the wolf, a carnivore, the confusion may come about because they have been scavengers for many years, and so lived with some vegetable matter in their diet, and, unlike cats, are not ‘obligate’ carnivores, but still are healthiest and thrive more on a diet more like their wild dog ancestors. This means your dog is not getting the right amounts of nutrients which will cause health and growth problems if simply fed a normal omnivorous diet as vegetables, fruit etc. will not be proportionate to your dogs needs, and will not have been prepared in such a way as to make the nutrients bio-available for your dog.

These are just the main few problems, but there are more, and unfortunately these problems mean your dogs immune system, which is what fights illness and infection to keep them  well, is going to be compromised and unable to operate at peak performance levels.