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I’d like your indulgence to begin this entry with an opener that may seem out of place at first.  I’d like to talk a bit about High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS).

You know, that’s the sweet substitute for sugar that has been showing up in everything from childrens’ cereals to soft drinks to jams and jellies.  Many say it’s the smoking gun behind America’s epidemic of obesity.  I think the jury’s still out about that, but it’s not really the topic I wanted to discuss here anyway, so I’ll let the question go for the moment.

You may have seen the masterful public spin campaign launched by the HFCS manufacturers, featuring commercials in which family and friends are the subjects of condescension and ridicule when they can’t articulate what’s wrong with HFCS.  Well, for your future relief from these sorts of situations, here it is:

HFCS — like every refined sweetner — puts more sweetness (read calories from Fructose, Sucrose, Glucose, Maltose) into a small, consumable volume than nature ever intended. That’s it.

You see, whether you believe Mr. Darwin or not, the truth is that living things adapt over very long periods of time because some of them don’t do well with some factor in their environment, causing them to die before they can reproduce.  Thus they don’t contribute their genes to the future of their species.

These factors include food, competitors, or other conditions of their life.  The living things that do best live long enough to reproduce, and that starts another generation that has the genes that their survivor parents had.  So, in a perfect world with little generational gene mutation, the new generation have been — at birth — equipped to survive under the conditions that their parents survived.  If those conditions don’t change, we can expect the offspring to have similar chances of survival and reproduction.

So, what is “the natural package?”  Natural packaging of foods has nothing to do with manufacturing processes or recycled paper, hemp, or avoiding plastics or chemicals.  The natural package of foods is the package that nature provides.  An apple before processing is packaged by nature to be portable, consumable, and to survive for some time after being separated from its parent tree.  Humans and animals alike developed over thousands of years consuming food packaged by nature — not by humans.

Since many, many generations of humans adapted to “naturally packaged” foods and flourished long, long before we began to “process” our foods for various reasons, the idea of squeezing all the sweetness out of something and storing it in an impossibly unnatural concentration in a small physical space so that it would be cheaper to store, transport, and use just didn’t occur to them, because it really wasn’t ever necessary — and still isn’t.   (It did occur to bees, however, and honey is probably the closest thing to processed sugars that exists in nature.  But, because of its scarce supply, it’s never been something that humans really adapted to consume in any quantity.)

But, because HFCS and refined sugars of all types DO exist today, we are able to consume more sweetness at one time than our ancestors’ bodies ever encountered.

Nature packages sweet substances like fructose in plants mostly.  Along with the fructose, there’s all the other packaging material that comes with the plant.  They’re designed to be consumed together.  So, when you eat one of the sweetest fruits available (for instance, a fig — very high on the natural sweetness scale) you also get water and other components of the fruit, mostly fiber, that fills you up.  This makes it nearly impossible for you to consume very large amounts of sugary sweetness.  (Honey is one possibility, yes.  But honey creates different physiological reactions which limit its intake — such as leptin production evoked by insulin secretion– and it could be argued that humans aren’t really intended to be honey-eaters, anyway.)  The natural “packaging” of apples, figs, pear, and all fruit creates additional matter that automatically regulates our consumption of calories from fructose, sucrose, etc.

So, what does this have to do with dog food? I’m glad  you asked.

MOST processed food for dogs does something to change the natural packaging of the food — mostly for convenience and to make it cheaper to store, transport, and sell.  Just as refined (processed) sugars separate sweetness (fructose, sucrose, glucose, maltose) from the plant, so proteins, carbohydrates and fats are separated from their original packaging , then re-packaged and re-shaped to include in dog food.

Processing changes the packaging, and makes it possible to eat food in ways that are compositionally different than our bodies (or our dog’s bodies) are tuned for.

So, what if we discovered that obesity, diabetes, and other chronic conditions and diseases from kidney and bladder stones to heart disease were caused or complicated by eating foods in the wrong way, because we take them out of their natural packaging?

When we process foods for convenience, we open a pandora’s box of good and bad uses for that food — and we change that food into a different food.  The uses follow the processing that was performed, though.   There are responsible uses for processing food, like canning fruits and vegetables to preserve them for a time when fresh isn’t available.  And there are irresponsible uses for processing, like removing and concentrating sugars from plants so that they’re easy to store, cheap to transport, and plentiful for keeping people addicted to the energy rush that comes from consumption of sugars.

So, also, there is irresponsible use of processing in our dog’s food. When manufacturers create concentrated packages of extruded bits of meat proteins, carbohydrates and fats that aren’t in their original form, it’s difficult to know whether our dogs are eating the right amounts of any of these.  Forget the reality that those processed proteins are often broken into peptides that dog digestion simply has no idea what to do with.   Conversely, nature places food components into packaging that our dog’s bodies know exactly how to handle.

Humans create processed versions of foods for several reasons.  One of those is convenience.  So, I’ve said all of this to make this point:  as with the consequences of HFCS now coming to light,  the consequences of eating and feeding processed sub-versions of what was a formerly natural food in its natural packaging are just now beginning to be exposed.  Now you know.

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