Feeding Them What Comes Naturally: Keeping Our Pets Healthy With a Raw Food Diet
by Cheryl Davies
Over half of us share our lives with pets. But although we take care of ourselves by eating well, exercising, employing stress-relief techniques and limiting exposure to cigarette smoke, alcohol and such, many of us forget to extend that level of care to our pets. Of special concern is their diet.
Perhaps you buy high end commercial pet food and feel that this will ensure that your dog or cat is eating an optimum diet. But that's just not true. Veterinarian Dr. Donald Ogden says that even the most expensive, high quality pet food can have its nutrients altered, adulterated, devitalized and destroyed by heat, processing, coloring, preservatives and other chemicals. Therefore, feeding your pet such food on a regular basis causes waste toxins to accumulate in their blood, lymphs and tissue, which contributes to a weak immune system and renders the animal susceptible to chronic diseases.
But there is a way to prevent such a dismal fate for your pet and it's called the Raw Food Diet (often referred to as the species appropriate diet). Raw foods have become popular amongst ultra-healthy humans, and the concept isn't so different for our pets. Think about what wolves and panthers eat in the wild; they don't likely have a lot of starchy carbohydrates at their disposal, nor do they cook the meat of their prey on a stove before they eat it. Carnivores thrive on raw meat.
Commercial dry pet food contains approximately 40 percent carbohydrates (CHO), while cats in the wild only eat between two and six percent carbohydrates. In contrast, dogs require a slightly higher percentage of carbohydrates than cats. Dogs are also considered to be more omnivorous than cats, while cats are basically carnivorous. Domesticated cats have the same dietary requirements as wild cats, and overfeeding carbohydrates is detrimental to their health. And carbohydrates are what constitutes the meat-flavored cereal that we're feeding our dogs and cats, sabotaging their health along the way. Despite what you may think, their bodies have not adapted to the carbohydrate-driven foods and cooked meats that we've been feeding them for so many years.
In Australia and in parts of Europe, it is commonplace for pet owners to feed their cats and dogs raw meat and bones on a regular basis, so it would seem that North Americans are somewhat out of the loop, and our animals are suffering for it.
"We are seeing disease conditions in animals that we did not see years ago. Many of these may be traced to nutrition as the source," says veterinarian Don E. Lundholm. And many experts wholeheartedly agree with him. In December of 2002, the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association (JAVMA) published an article entitled "The Carnivore Connection to Nutrition in Cats" by Dr. L Zoran, DVM, PhD, DACVIM. Dr. Zoran discusses the feline's unique nutritional biochemistry, writing that "cats are strict carnivores that rely on nutrients in animal tissues to meet their specific and unique nutritional requirements... [Cats] have limited ability to spare protein utilization by using CHOs instead. Nevertheless, commercial diets are formulated with a mixture of animal- and plant-derived nutrients, most commonly in dry kibble form that requires CHOs for the expansion and cooking process, to provide easy-to-use food for domestic cats. And although cats have adjusted to most manufactured diets, the limitations of substituting animal-origin nutrients with plant-origin nutrients in foods formulated for cats are being increasingly realized."
(Remainder of article coming shortly...)
-March/April 2006 edition of Natural Life Magazine
