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Some Food for Thought

Over the past year, we learned that our pets were being given dog/cat foods containing toxic
ingredients...but did anyone mention that the recalled pet foods listed on most sources were
only the ones who voluntarily re-called their products and that the law did not require all the
makers to recall theirs? They should have. But at least, it got everyone to thinking about what
they were feeding their pets. Good.

Here are some of the most important facts you may read about your pets' food ...

Chemical contamination of our foods is an increasing problem & is becoming a major factor in
chronic disease particularly in animals. The process starts with the herbicides, insecticides,
and fungicides used to grow crops. Today, we are using pesticides at a rate 13,000 times
greater than we did in 1962. Antibiotics, growth stimulants, hormones, tranquilizers, and other
drugs are also fed to livestock consuming grains, The EPA has been allowing the recycling of
industry waste-material loaded with heavy metals-into commercial fertilizers. In the soil, plants
take them up into their tissues where they remain for the life of the plant. When an animal
consumes this plant, metals enter the animal’s body and collect there. The more plant that is
eaten, the more heavy metal collects in the tissues. If that animal is eaten by another on the food
chain, the additional accumulation is more concentrated and is passed on. The problem for
carnivores is that the buck stops with them. Note: Average chemical pollution of breast milk in
American women that consume meat, compared to that of American women who are
complete vegetarians is 35 times higher.

In sampling of canned pet food, it was revealed that lead contamination levels ranging from 0.9
to 7.0 parts per million (ppm) in cat food and 1.0 to 5.6 ppm in dog food. Daily intake of only six
ounces of such food would exceed the dose of lead considered potentially toxic for children.
Most of the contamination comes from the bone meal, otherwise an excellent source of calcium
and other minerals, the American cattle contain high levels of lead, owing to our prolonged
usage of leaded gasoline over several decades. Safe bone meal today originates from South
America, Ethiopia & other countries with fewer automobiles. Signs of lead poisoning come on
gradually and can exhibit as a type of anemia while some animals exhibit other signs of the
contamination and can be hyperactive, have seizures, become hysterical, go blind, have
stomach cramps and diarrhea, constipation or develop thickened and itchy skin and not all
these symptoms occur…sometimes there may be just one. Who would believe one animal can
present with clinical signs of anemia and another with seizures? Who would have guessed both
could be victims of the same thing?

The major problem of chemical contamination to our food sources is compounded by the fact
that in 1989, some 70,000 different chemical were in use by our society with nearly 3,000 new
chemicals being introduced annually since. As of 1990, only about 3 percent of all these
chemicals have been tested for their ability to cause cancer. The interaction between different
chemicals in the same body tissue can result in different outcomes. They can ‘ignore’ one
another having no interaction, one can act on the other causing it to become a completely
different chemical possibly more toxic or they can work on one another causing each to have
increased effects. While scientific communities can tell us that one particular chemical may not
be harmful at certain levels, they have no idea how it will interact with other contaminants in the
same body.

As of late, raw meat diets have come forward as the ideal way to feed our pets, but for the
inactive pet, this diet can be very rich in addition to being high in chemical contamination with
the exception being if the meat is from an organic source. While animals being fed on this diet
have improved health, much of that is related to the fact that the depleted ingredients found in
the commercially prepared diets are far inferior. However there is still chemical contamination
to be found in that meat only diet. Another example of chemicals in the food animal is DES, a
female hormone used to fatten cattle, which is carried into the meat and thus into your dog,
gradually having effects over time. This estrogen will not only fatten the cattle fed with it, but
your animal in time and estrogen has been proven to cause cancer development. Bone meal for
human consumption and sold in natural food stores cannot come from US cattle due to the lead
deposits found in their bone however, animal food manufacturers can and do use bone meal
taken from our US cattle.

Using a combination of meat, vegetables and grains, human grade sources wherever possible,
presents the alternative to this all meat protein diet. The combination of meat with the grains
and veggies provides a higher protein level comparable with (most of the time exceeding) the
protein levels found in commercial food.

As to meats in the diets, we must be reminded of the ‘mad cow disease’ that has hit the news
time and again. It might be interesting to learn that a study done in 1992 of 444 dogs in England
of dogs showing symptoms suggestive of this disease were found to have the disease
themselves as ‘scrapie’-associated fibrils (the name for the mad cow disease found in sheep)
were identified in the brains of these dogs. Strangely enough, the animals normally thought to
exist on grass and plants, are actually being fed tissue from their own kind as an additional feed
source in order to reduce costs & find a way to use rendered animal parts. In the New York
Times in 2004, an article pointed out that our calves are fed blood instead of milk and cattle feed
containing composted wastes from chicken coops including feathers, spilled feed and even
feces have been fed for years as a common practice in this country. As quoted in the article
rendered animal products go 43% to poultry, 23% to pet food, 13% to swine, 10% to cattle and
11% to other uses such as food for farmed fish. In Europe, 25% of the cattle are tested for ‘mad
cow disease’, Japan tests 100% and the US only tests 5 or 6 per million head of cattle.