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All About Food – A Veterinary Diet vs. The Rest

One of the questions I ask pet owners when I see their pet for a Wellness appointment is  "What food do you feed?"  The responses I get range from inexpensive grocery store options to expensive pet store foods to home cooked diets.  But what is best?  Why do we make the food recommendations we do?  Why do I use a therapeutic (medical diet) for one patient and not another?  I hope the following information will help to answer some of those questions.

 Here’s one example: Recently I saw a dog that has an intestinal disease called lymphangectasia.  The diagnosis was made by intestinal biopsy at a referral clinic.  Dogs with this disease cannot handle even normal amounts of fat in their diet and must be on ultra low fat diets as part of their treatment (which also includes medication and supplemental Vitamin B12).  So I took a complete history and performed a physical exam on the patient in order to better understand this patient in her entirety including the home environment, owner’s wishes and her pet’s other health conditions.  We talked about her medication and supplement schedule and then about how best to feed her.

The owner had started feeding a combination of home cooked whitefish and sweet potato.  Although these are great from an ultra low fat perspective, balanced they are not. I recommended adding in, or ideally fully converting to Royal Canin Veterinary Diets Gastro-intestinal Low Fat.  This is a diet that is designed specifically for dogs with fat intolerant conditions like lymphangectasia and pancreatitis and it is to be used as a long term diet meaning that it is complete and balanced.  The owner looked at the label and this is what she read:  “Main Ingredients: Pork By-Products, Corn Grits, Rice Flour……"  "Guaranteed Analysis:  Crude Protein min 6%, Crude Fat min 1%, Moisture max 77%"

She looked at me in horror.  Her friend, who had done a lot of research, had told her that she should never feed her dog by-products or grains.  What was I thinking? I explained to her that neither by-products nor grains are harmful and can be excellent sources of nutrients.  She didn’t believe me and left the clinic to go to the Pet Store to find something similar.  I asked her to bring it back so we could compare what she found with the veterinary designed diet.

My client came back in the next day with a can of Natural Balance Limited Ingredient – Fish and Sweet Potato.  The main ingredients were as follows:  Fish Broth, Ocean White Fish, Sweet Potatoes, Salmon, Potatoes, Salmon Meal, Canola Oil…..  The Guaranteed Analysis listed Crude Protein min 7%, Crude Fat min 4% and Moisture max 78%.

We sat down and did a comparison.  We know the canned foods contain 77% and 78% water respectively (as all canned foods do).  We can then approximate the amount of fat in each diet on a dry matter basis by dividing the % fat by the % dry matter and multiplying by 100.  For the Veterinary Diet, we have 1% divided by 23% X 100 = 4%.  For the Natural Balance Diet we have 4% divided by 22% X 100 = 18% Fat.  So the Natural Balance Diet has 4.5 times the amount of fat as the veterinary diet designed to treat the disease the dog has.

A trip through any Pet Store will yield more of the same.  It is not likely possible to find a comparable fat restricted diet anywhere other than at the veterinarian’s office. They simply do not exist.  While the intentions of this wonderful pet owner were excellent, the pet store diet would have been detrimental to her dog, resulting in additional medical care, medication, costs, or even death.  This however left us with two options.  The first is feeding the veterinary low fat diet.  The second is to have a properly balanced home cooked diet created by a veterinary nutritionist, a referral service which is readily available but requires a trip to the Ontario Veterinary College.

So what about those by –products and grains?  Aren’t they bad?  Aren’t they just filler?

By-product is merely a word used to describe any part of an animal other than the muscle meat.  Pet food manufacturers, especially those selling in the US are required to list any animal based food ingredient that is NOT muscle meat as by-product.  And there is nothing wrong with by-product!  No carnivore in the wild eats just muscle meat.  Skin, visceral organs and their contents provide wild carnivores with a large variety of nutrients not found in muscle meat alone.  If you ask Royal Canin, they will tell you that the pork by-product in their food comes from healthy veterinary inspected pigs and contains organ meat, bone and joint tissue but no hooves or hair or other inedible material.  The pork by-products are used as they are an excellent source of protein, fat, minerals such as iron, vitamins such as B12 and Vitamin A and other nutrients such as glucosamine, chondroitin, and L-carnitine.

With respect to grains, there is no scientific evidence to support that it is a bad idea to feed the average pet grain based food.  All dry grain free diets contain some sort of carbohydrate – usually potato or sweet potato.  Wild carnivores are in fact far more likely to eat grains in the digestive tracts of their prey species and forage for grains than they are to dig up and eat root vegetables such as potatoes!  Refined grains are more digestible for dogs and cats than whole grains and fractions of grains such as wheat gluten (the protein portion of wheat) is an excellent source of nutrition, not "just filler".

So why are people so adverse to grains in pet food?  Well chicken, beef, corn and wheat are among the most common food allergens.  This is a reflection of the fact that they are commonly used in pet foods, not that they are more allergenic than other foods.  So pets with suspected food allergies should avoid these common allergens as well as several others.  For animals without food allergy, these ingredients are of no concern and are excellent sources of nutrition when found in a high quality and balanced product.

This brings me to my last point:  quality.  There was recently a study done at Chapman University in the US.  52 supposedly high quality non-veterinary diets were evaluated with respect to ingredients.  Of the 52, 16 contained meat that was not on the package label.  In addition, 7 of the 52 contained meat that was unidentifiable!  Veterinary diets are guaranteed for quality and purity and are ALL nutritionist designed.  For this and many other reasons, preventive and therapeutic veterinary diets are well worth discussing with your veterinarian today.

In the end, my client decided to feed the Veterinary Low Fat diet, with occasional whitefish and sweet potato cooked as a treat.  Her pup is doing well and she is symptom free, and that is the best news of all.