What to feed your animals

By CARRIE PEYTON DAHLBERG
Monday, March 26, 2007

The major pet food recall horrifying dog and cat lovers has raised the heat under a slowly simmering debate over what's the healthiest meal for the animals that share our lives.

Partly fueled by distrust of the $14 billion-plus pet food industry, and partly mirroring trends in human cuisine, many people are making home-cooked meals for their pets, dishing up raw meat and bones, or going vegetarian.

"Just like with people, there's a very emotional aspect around food," said Andrea Fascetti, a nutrition professor at the University of California Davis' School of Veterinary Medicine.

"If we're doing something that makes us feel better, we of course want to translate that to our animals," Fascetti said.

Fascetti, who runs a nutrition support service that helps vets around the world develop or assess special diets, says she's beginning to see more interest in raw foods, more interest in home-cooked foods _ and more problem diets circulating on the Internet.

"We are frequently asked by owners or their vets to evaluate something they've found," she said, "and we frequently find problems, often deficiencies, sometimes excesses."

While the nutrition service offers plenty of support for people who want alternatives _ even down to suggesting kosher options _ Fascetti stressed that despite the Menu Foods recall, mass market pet food can be trusted.

"People should know that this is not a common occurrence. Over the history of commercial pet foods, they have been very safe and a very good way to feed animals to ensure that they're meeting their nutrient requirements."

That's what vet Jodi Van Tine thought, too, until her golden retriever, Bailey, treated for years with allergy injections and prescription foods, sickened and died from cancer.

While she doesn't claim the food was at fault, Van Tine, who practices at the Integrative Veterinary Center in Sacramento, Calif., now believes her dog's health would have been better managed with balanced, home-cooked meals.

Van Tine coaches pet owners through the difficult, time-consuming process of making sure such diets are nutritionally sound, but for those with less time, she offers this advice:

"Read the labels. If you would eat it, then feed it to your pet."

On Van Tine's long list of a label's red flags: preservatives, artificial or natural flavors, corn syrup or sugar, and the words "byproducts," "meal" or "digest" used in phrases like "beef byproducts," "chicken meal" or "animal extracts." Pet-food makers often use ingredients left over from human food manufacturing, she said, but "a pet's not a garbage disposal."

While Van Tine is convinced of the logic behind opting for higher quality ingredients, she acknowledges the scarcity of scientific data to back up many of the most broadly circulated alternative diet claims.

No one has done rigorous studies, with the kind of controls common in peer-reviewed journals, to test whether raw meat and bones are better than cooked, or whether home cooking is better than canned. That hasn't stopped the conversation.

While certain animals do have documented problems with certain ingredients, it's individual, said Fascetti, using a human analogy: Just because your neighbor is allergic to strawberries doesn't mean you are.

Carrie Peyton Dahlberg can be reached at cpeytondahlberg(at) sacbee.com. For more stories visit scrippsnews.com