The-Truth-About-Pet-Foods

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THE “EXOTIC INGREDIENTS MEAN
GOOD NUTRITION” MYTH
The fervor of the race for a niche, an edge, in the pet food market
intensifies.
Since most pet foods are essentially made the same, the only place
left to be “special” is on the ingredient list. So we now have foods with
grapefruit, turnip greens, parsley oil, dandelion, split peas, thyme, apples,
spearmint, marigolds, persimmons, broccoli, eyebright, quail eggs, and
on and on. (Kind of starts to sound like lizard tongue, bat wing and eye of
newt, doesn’t it) Although each of these ingredients prepared properly
may have some food or nutraceutical merit, just mixing a smidgen into
standard mixed “100% complete” processed foods just to create a fancy
label is another matter. Without scientific evidence of value at the levels
being used (which never seems to be there), such fad exotics can only
create a false sense of nutrition.
Then there is the question of cost. If these ingredients were being
used in a proportion that could have any meaning other than homeopathically
(a branch of medicine based upon infinitesimally small dosage), they
would put the price of the food out of reach of everyone but Bill Gates.
For example, many such ingredients can range from between $10 to over
$200 per pound. If such ingredients were used in meaningful amounts, a
forty-pound bag of dry food could cost $100 or more.
But most consumers don’t think this through. They get swept along
by beguiling ingredients and evocative propaganda and don’t put two and
two together. Is it not strange that twenty pounds of the food they are
buying for twenty dollars might cost $100 or more if they were to buy
the fresh ingredients in the grocery store That doesn’t include the
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