In the past decade, many books have been written about the evils of commercial pet foods (for example, Food Pets Die For: Shocking Facts About Pet Food by Ann Martin; also, Dr. Pitcairn’s New Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs and Cats by Richard Pitcairn). These books describe many different kinds of additives, contaminants, and unsavory ingredients in the foods that line the shelves of grocery stores and pet stores offered as “complete and balanced, high-quality nutrition” for your furry family members. Undoubtedly, there is some truth to these claims of undesirable, even toxic components used in pet foods. To be fair, however, I can draw on my own past experience as an executive of one of the leading pet food manufacturers to say that not all pet foods contain these harmful ingredients. 

Some commercial dog and cat foods actually contain pretty good-quality ingredients. Let’s face it; a pet owner would be foolish to believe that canned tuna-flavor cat food, as an example, has the same amount or quality of human-grade tuna that a can of tuna for human consumption has. The product intended for people will typically cost several times as much as the cat food. Clearly there is a big difference between the tuna quality and quantity of two such differently priced products. That is just common sense. 

The can of human-grade tuna is pure tuna, usually from the fillet of the fish, and processed under USDA inspection to be fit for human consumption. On the other hand, tuna cat food may have heads, tails, and other non-human-grade parts of the fish, and usually there will be substantial amounts of nontuna ingredients as well. If this were not the case, cat food (and dog food as well) would be far more costly than is presently is. While many pet owners would bear such a huge increase in cost for feeding their pets, many others would be unable to. Certainly, the pet food companies would have a harder time marketing such costly products. 

The big differences between pet foods and human foods do not always mean that any particular cat food is bad for your cat. The truth is, however, labels on pet foods can be very misleading, so it can be difficult for owners to choose these products wisely. Sometimes ingredients in the food may not even be listed on the label. The amounts, as well as the quality of the various ingredients in pet foods, can vary widely between two seemingly similar products manufactured by different companies. The quality control and commitment to a set ingredient formula by different companies varies as much as the ingredients. This is true even though virtually all pet food packages today contain claims that they “meet or exceed AAFCO [American Association of Feed Control Officials] requirements” of some sort. 

A Cat is Not a Small Dog

Things are even more complicated when we focus on commercial foods specifically for cats. Here, the varying combinations of meat and vegetable ingredients in commercial foods is as important as ingredient quality and wholesomeness. This will surprise many readers, but is 

absolutely true. As I will discuss at length in succeeding chapters, the ratio of the three energy macronutrients (carbohydrate, fat, and protein) in a food, as well as the amount of indigestible fiber, will affect the long-term health of the cat, as much as the purity of the various ingredients. These long-term effects start with the food that the kitten consumes. 

It is just as dangerous for cats to eat imbalanced combinations of high carbohydrate, high non-nutritive fiber, or low protein, as it would be for a cat to eat foods with inferior-quality ingredients. This is because of the very specific dietary requirements of the obligatory carnivore that we discussed in chapter 1. Such dangerous nutrient imbalances are commonplace in cat foods even in the scientifically enlightened time in which we live. All of them run counter to the documented scientific understanding of the needs of the cat, yet they are responsible for many of the medical problems we veterinarians see in our feline patients. 

Pet Food Is an Unregulated Industry 

(see www.leda.law.harvard.edu/leda/data/784/Patrick06.pdf) 

The pet food industry in the United States and the rest of the world is essentially unregulated by any third-party regulatory body. Even though the Food and Drug Administration (the federal regulatory agency known as the FDA) has legal authority over the labeling and claims for pet food, the FDA does not exercise this authority in any meaningful way. There are three important reasons for this unfortunate state of affairs: 

1. The FDA is also responsible for making sure that the massive U.S. pharmaceutical industry is supervised for the safety of human prescription and over-the-counter medication users. At times when the federal budget is squeezed (nearly always), the agency has few resources available for exercising stringent oversight on the safety of pet food. 
2. Another governmental regulator, the AAFCO, is the organization through which the fifty state governments try to work together to establish an enforce animal feed requirements. AAFCO’s primary responsibility is ensure the safety of feed for human-food-producing livestock. Like the FDA, AAFCO must commit the lion’s share of its limited resources to human health safety concerns, not companion animal health concerns. AAFCO requires essentially no meaningful testing of foods before companies may use its broad endorsement language on pet food labels. 
3. The Pet Food Institute (PFI) is the lobbying group in Washington DC that watches out for the pet food manufacturing industry’s interests at the governmental level. This group is exceedingly well funded and can outspend FDA’s and AAFCO’s budgets for

pet food-related regulatory activities at all times. PFI makes sure that federal and state legislation that would impose more supervision and stronger regulatory oversight on pet food companies does not pass. 

Pet Food Is So Very Profitable 

Today’s pet owners spend many billions of dollars on the commercial foods they purchase and feed to their dogs and cats. The cost of producing these foods is low because the ingredients are inexpensive compared to human food ingredients. Further, there is little genuine scientific testing of any kind done on the nutritional suitability and safety of pet food, and virtually no long-term adequacy testing (the most costly of all tests). To make long-term feeding claims, pet food companies only have to meet basic minimum nutrient-content requirements without any testing at all, or may use small, six-month acute toxicity testing to earn the government’s quality certification. These tests typically are conducted by the companies themselves, and the results are not closely monitored by the government. These extremely lax validation requirements help to keep the profit margins for pet foods extremely high. 

I have no quibble with corporations’ making a profit. Without a profit motive, no company would ever bother to produce a particular product. Excessive profits are intolerable, however, when they come at the expense of genuine science in the development and production of a product so that it is safe and meets its label’s claims. 

Most of the pet foods now available in groceries and pet stores claim to be “complete and balanced” as a sole food for the entire life of a pet. This claim cannot possibly be valid unless the food has been tested scientifically for the life of at least a large enough number of animals to be statistically believable. To be convincing, such studies would have to show that the food does not cause acute or chronic nutritional diseases when compared to other, species-appropriate foods. No such scientifically valid long-term testing has ever been done on any of these products. 

As of the time of the writing of this book, no fewer than two large-scale pet food recalls occurred because the food carried lethal amounts of aflatoxin (a poison from fungus) in some of the batches of food. Many dogs and cats became ill and some even died of this poisoning before the problem was discovered and the company had to recall the foods involved. Another recall occurred in several “prescribed” foods for pets made by one company. These foods had very high levels of vitamin D, which caused high calcium levels in a number of the pets fed the food.

Once this was discovered, the foods were recalled. In the latter incident, a company spokesman was quoted as saying that as a result of reports of affected pets “we started an exhaustive nutrient analysis of our canned products.” In other words, the company felt compelled to conduct their rigorous nutrient analyses after the problem was discovered, but not before the foods were available for feeding to pets! This seems a backward approach to quality assurance in foods labeled as safe for lifetime feeding to cats and dogs. 

These two most recent problems of untested foods are not isolated events. Such acute problems happen with some frequency, but do not always cause enough disease and death to create a national or international uproar. Both illustrate perfectly how pet foods truly are inadequately tested for safety and efficacy by the self-regulated pet food industry. 

If the testing needed to properly validate even short-term safety of pet foods isn’t being done, imagine how much more unjustified are the lifetime safety claims on pet foods, considering that such tests are even more expensive than short-term tests. Further, long-term safety studies would delay the marketing of pet foods, increasing their cost. The pet food companies are simply not willing to make this investment in science, and the FDA and AAFCO do not require such testing before they allow broad claims. In reality, the only long-term tests of pet foods that ever occur are the tests that owners themselves conduct when they feed these foods to their own pets. 

Your Cat Is an “Experimental Animal” 

If a food is marketed as “complete and balanced for the life of a pet” with the AAFCO statement on the label assuring this completeness, pet food purchasers have no reason to doubt the safety of that food. This assurance is unfounded, however. Because of the strong profit-motive of the pet food companies to rush products to market, and the lack of governmental regulation controlling this rush to market, pet owners are themselves providing the experimental animals for testing the actual truth of adequacy claims. It is hard to imagine a more unfair, and unsafe, situation. Having pet food purchasers test the foods on their own pets is only half of the problem, however. 

Not only are pet owners unaware of the untested nature of the claims on pet foods, the veterinary profession is equally unaware of it. Veterinarians are familiar with the rigorous safety training imposed on pharmaceuticals they use for their patients. They receive assurances from the pet food companies that products with AAFCO label assurances undergo similar kinds of testing to validate the claims on those labels. Naturally, veterinarians assume that a government statement of adequacy deserves their trust and endorsement. Most veterinarians today make commercial pet food recommendations to their clients. Few, if any, would provide those endorsements if they understood how little meaningful testing

those recommended foods actually undergo. This point has been amply illustrated by recalls of dry food for aflatoxin contamination in 2006 and a massive recall for kidney toxins in canned cat foods in 2007. In both situations, the packaging of all contaminated foods carried AAFCO nutritional safety and efficacy guarantee statements, despite not being uniformly safe at all. 

Without their knowledge, veterinarians have been assigned the role of professional evaluators of the results of long-term pet food feeding trials in which their patients are experimental animals. But if veterinarians don’t understand that they are unwittingly cast in the role of pet food researchers, how can they possibly know to watch out for negative effects of these untested foods? If veterinarians believe the foods they are recommending have already been proven safe in real tests, why would they become alarmed or even suspicious of nutritional disease when large numbers of their feline patients develop chronic degenerative problems like obesity, diabetes, bladder problems, inflammatory bowel disease, kidney problems, and many others? 

This is exactly the situation in which we all find ourselves. The short-term and long-term feeding tests needed to earn the label claims on pet foods have not been done in the manufacturer’s laboratory. Instead, they are being done in the general pet population, with millions of test subjects. This is certainly enough test animals to satisfy any statistician, but the veterinarians who are monitoring the results of this huge test don’t know what to watch for in this experiment. In fact, these medical professionals have no reason to believe they are to watch for anything at all. 

These testing inadequacies apply not only to the “well-pet” cat foods, but also to the so-called prescribed foods that are commonly used to manage disease in cats. Although these special foods often claim to have been validated in scientific studies conducted at veterinary schools, these claims are also misleading. The third-party research these foods undergo is actually quite limited. Not only are the numbers of diseased cats involved small, by scientific standards, the studies themselves are very narrowly designed and fundeed by the various producing companies. Usually the purpose of such studies is to prove the food does what the manufacturer already claims that it does. 

Because these studies are specific-results-oriented and funded by an interested party, there is too little objectivity in their design and implementation. Further, if a study fails to provide a positive result for the company’s marketing purposes, the company will not publish that information. Veterinarians do not get to see research results that reflect negatively on the manufacturer’s claims. Unfortunately, without pet food company funding for research, academic veterinarians do not have the resources to conduct genuinely objective, thorough evaluations of these disease-managing diets.

In the next sections of this book, we will see over and over again how pet foods are not safe for the lifetime feeding of pet cats. We will see how these foods cause many life-threatening diseases without veterinarians or pet owners suspecting the link between a cat’s diet and its disease. We will also see how the very “prescribed” foods that are marketed to solve these already diet-caused problems ignore the true causative factors and create more problems. 

Think About It 

To bring a new drug to market and make legal claims for the safety and effectiveness of that drug, pharmaceutical companies must spend hundreds of millions of dollars and work a decade or more testing that product. All claims for an available drug’s safe use have been verified, and possible negative side effects identified, before it is available to the public. We have nothing even remotely close to this kind of rigorous safety testing in pet foods. Now, to be fair, it is unthinkable that any company would spend the kind of time or money to assure the safety of a pet food comparable to what pharmaceutical companies must spend to bring a drug to market. Yet, the fact remains that the kinds of claims that pet food companies are alas true. Pet owners and veterinarians are misled to believe that the foods labeled with health claims are backed by scientific tests proving those claims are valid. This mistaken belief causes nearly every veterinarian to endorse pet foods with such claims.