Guidelines For Choosing The Right Food For Your Pet.

Pet Foods that Meet WSAVA Guidelines for providing nutrition and safety for our pets.

In light of the FDA identifying specific combinations of legumes and exotic animal proteins leading to heart disease in dogs that had not had this kind of heart disease before, we feel that client education is the most important part of moving forward together.  Pet nutrition is very near and dear our hearts as we know the most important drug that you put into a diet is food.  To better understand nutrition, we will start with educating you on how to pick the right food for your pet.  We understand that feeding your pet high quality ingredients is important to you as well as it is an emotional aspect of the human/animal bond.  Feeling like you have picked the wrong food is hurtful.   Our goal is to move forward together.  As Mary Angelou stated, “when we know more, we do better”.  My husband and I teach our children that we “only know what we know” and because of this part of my job is to continue to learn so I can know more and do better.  Sifting through over 400 companies I was astonished on how many companies do not comply with WSAVA guidelines.  Take corn for example (we have more research on corn than any other ingredient in pet food: we know how it affects our dogs when heated (high, low), powdered and in meal).  Corn is also an emotional ingredient: you either don’t care that corn is in your pet’s diet, or you care deeply.  This is also eye opening to us in our profession as shouldn’t we know how every ingredient affects dogs prior to placing it in their food?  Shouldn’t we know our beloved sweet potato as complete as corn? 

We do believe that for all of the dogs affected by the diets that it is not a taurine deficiency but how these exotic proteins, legumes, and carbohydrates break down in the gastrointestinal tract and block the ability for the dog to use taurine, thus, simply supplementing the dog’s diet with taurine is not the answer.  Now, we know that the dogs affected were healthy prior to the foods, they did not have any outside influences such as flea/tick meds or prescriptions that interfered with their diet or their bodies.  These dogs affected were also not known to have congenital predisposition to heart disease and the genetic implications (following lineage, siblings) did not result in any other dog developing the disease.  That being said, we know that the information provided by the FDA can and should be studied for a way to do better. 

So where do we start?  We are currently looking into this as an industry standard and industry improvement as how did all of these companies end up being able to be sold but did not pass the most elementary cut off test: the AAFCO feeding trial.  We believe in Veterinary Medicine that we can do better than just AAFCO but AAFCO is a starting place, and is the least expensive and easiest to pass trial, as well as humane for the animals, but very few companies comply.   AAFCO feeding trials are extremely important in understanding how a diet will affect pets.  Although this is a very simple test to perform (and we can do better) it is a baseline on which pet foods make/don’t make the cut.  If the pet food companies decide to omit this step or to balance according to guidelines but do not test, that is a red flag to me that they care more about advertising than nutritional quality.  I have included the AAFCO Feeding trial information:

How can you identify the pet foods that have undergone “more rigorous” testing of their pet food, rather than just the AAFCO statement on the bag?

Unfortunately, you can't. Even veterinarians can’t. The pet food label is really a legal document, and is not designed to convey significant nutritional information. As much as some sources (such as internet ranking lists) would like it to be possible, you cannot evaluate 'quality' from the label, especially from ingredient lists. You need to consider the manufacturer (reputation, experience, investment in AAFCO trials and research, etc.), cost, availability, and your subjective clinical impressions of how your pets are doing on various diets.

Board certified veterinary nutritionists in clinical practice are alerted to dietary issues with specific diets because of extensive interaction with clients, practitioners, and each other. Therefore, these specialists are often a reliable resource for determining which diets are causing disease problems.

The World Small Animal Veterinary Association Nutrition Toolkit developed by the WSAVA Global Nutrition Committee provides many useful nutrition resources including Recommendations on Selecting Pet Foods. This document lists eight questions you can ask pet food manufacturers to help evaluate their suitability and is available on their website.