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Old 02-13-2011, 09:34 AM
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Thumbs down Commercial Pet Food Unhealthy

Commercial food is unhealthy for your pet

by Madeleine Innocent

(NaturalNews) People often have the common belief that most commercial pet food is perfectly balanced, nutritious and healthy. Especially if their veterinarian sells it. However, little could be further from the truth.

Most advertising tends to show what people believe to be learned from scientists, but the information is actually just endorsing a product. Then, slogans reinforce this with clever wording: such as 'organic', 'natural', 'no added preservatives', 'perfectly balanced', 'scientifically proved', 'veterinary approved', or other fashionable but not necessarily meaningful words.

Looking a little deeper, you may find something completely different, even alarming. And with it, a growing belief, especially amongst holistic veterinarians and animal natural therapists, that it is this that is the main cause of so many pet health problems.

Firstly, the quality of the meat. Most of this comes from rendering plants. These are adjuncts to slaughter houses which take in and process otherwise waste foods: such as supermarket rejects, waste from slaughtered animals (heads, hooves, beaks, feet, etc), euthanised cats and dogs from veterinary clinics, dead animals (from control measures, farms, roadkill, etc). The bodies are often left for days, rotting in the heat of the day, before being processed. ID tags, flea collars, identity tags and so forth are not removed.

A recent study also found some pet foods contain toxic levels of arsenic, lead, mercury, and even nuclear waste.

This 'raw material' is often then bulked out with a filler, to make the 'meat' go further. This can be anything that is low cost on the world commodity market - sugar, sawdust, newspaper, nut shells, melamine, to mention just a few.

At some stage, preservatives are added, preservatives such as ethoxyquin or formaldehyde. Neither of these preservatives are allowed in human food because of their high toxicity. Sadly, few people care about animals. Animals can't vote. The few laws governing pet food are ineffective and rarely enforced, depending on the country. If the rendering plant adds the preservative, rather than the pet food manufacturer, they can legally claim they did not add it.

The pet food industry realises that this end result is not very nutritious or healthy, so synthetic and isolated 'nutrients' are added. However, nutrients that are isolated are not natural and cannot be easily digested or utilised. Sometimes they can pass through undigested. Other times they can hang up in parts of the body, creating problems.

There is growing awareness of this problem and some small pet food companies with high ethics are emerging. However, unless you remain ever vigilant, you will never know when they have been sold on, often to the less ethical, more economically aware companies.

Perhaps the sure fire way of feeding your pet quality and healthy food is to make your own, from scratch. Daunting as this sounds, once you have learned the basics, it becomes an automatic part of your life.

There are some tricks to the conversion process, as this can produce typical detoxing symptoms, especially in older animals. Professional guidance and help through this process is strongly recommended.

sources
https://www.truthaboutpetfood.com/
https://www.barfworld.com/
https://www.altmd.com/Articles/The-H...
https://www.jivdaya.org/rendering_pl...
https://petcaretips.net/ethoxyquin.html
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� #2
Old 02-13-2011, 06:46 PM
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Great post - so many of the so called "premium foods" for dogs and cats are rubbish! Apart form the above mentioned toxins, they are also filled with grains and corn that dogs just do not digest well and are unnecessary. One specific brand comes to mind, in their ad and bags they feature a big corn cob as if it was the best thing ever!

I did a lot of research before I settled on a brand I'm happy to feed my dog, it's holistic and every ingredient is pronounceable and natural, nothing I wouldn't eat myself. Plus I supplement his food with natural food as well such as sardines, whoel eggs, boiled chicken and RAW bones

You can really tell by their poo, my guy's is small and solid, very little product that is not used by his little body!
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