I’ll never tell them how wrong they are, because it really doesn’t matter.  What is more important to us is that we’re seeing new interest, new entry, and new money getting involved in the development of better —  much better — food options for dogs.

But, I did have a problem with something I read on their site.  It seems that the owners were suggesting that the intent behind the phrase “complete and balanced” (which is a phrase coined by an industry that I don’t, generally, favor much) could be supplanted by just feeding a variety of foods to your dogs.

Well, yes.  Feeding a variety of foods is of substantial importance.  But, there’s just a mountain of evidence out there to support the fact that supplementing even whole food diets with the right mix of vitamins and minerals is a low-priced insurance policy to help ensure puppy development, proper growth for adolescents (including neural and brain growth), and proper cardiovascular, digestive, neural, and well, just about every other aspect of physiological development and maintenance.

I just wanted to take a moment to resoundingly state that new market entries with better food offerings for dogs are great.  But, let’s not compromise on nutrition.  Variety + “balance” = complete.

Enough said.

1. That raw meat-based diets appear to really benefit dogs in a variety of ways, including skin, coat, histamine responses, and food sensitivities;
2. That wild canids have eaten raw prey for millennia; but, domestic dogs aren’t wild, and the raw meat in today’s raw diets isn’t wild prey;
3. That thousands of veterinarians – good, conscientious, veterinarians –  have a huge problem with advocating raw meat meals for dogs;
4. That, even if a dog can eat,  say, raw chicken, and fend off a salmonella infection, the dog can still cross-infect humans and other animals;
5. There are at least a few known (possibly more undocumented?) cases of dogs that have died from eating raw meats taken from the same supply chains as human foods.  Perhaps these cases represent puppies or older dogs without adequate immune response.  But, is any number of deaths acceptable, especially if there’s an acceptable alternative that reduces risk?

So why not try to reconcile the doubts and concerns that these points raise?  The new raw meat foods were certainly making noticeable differences in my dog’s health, coat, and even alleviating problems like skin irritation, sensitivity, and histamine reactions (allergic responses.)   Feeding raw meat based diets seemed like finding the gold at the end of the rainbow.  But, there were still those points of concern!  I was certainly NOT going to just shrug these off as fabrications by commercial opposition to raw food, or a bunch of doctors who were really just trying to sell commercial pet foods from their back rooms.  There was, and is, more to it than that. My vet didn’t agree with my decision to feed raw meat based diets.  She vocally and equally adamantly warned me that I was just asking for trouble.  And, I found, she was joined by a chorus of other vets that said the same things.  Why? Were they all against my new-found success with raw diets?   I would discover that the answer was they were (and still are) trying to engage their Hippocratic tendency to do no harm. I set out to find reconciliation for these points of concern, my vet’s opposition, and what seemed to be the beneficial results of feeding a raw meat-based diet. Things I learned and considered:

• The transition from canned or bagged processed food to raw foods (including raw meats) most certainly provides substantial benefit. I’ve never met a vet (holistic or not) that wouldn’t admit that moving from a traditional canned or bagged food to a raw diet provides verifiable better nutrition and almost immediate benefit.  Imagine that you ate only fast food.  It’s high in fat and sugars, full of empty calories that are without substantial micro nutrients.   One day, you decide to start eating only raw foods and raw meat.  Your health would very, very probably improve dramatically! But, would it be smart, or would it be risky?
• We can compare human nutritional needs and digestion with that of dogs. Of course, we can, and we should.  Mostly we should because so much research has been done into human nutrition, and we should look for ways to identify crossover research.  But, we should frame what we compare with what we know to be true about dogs and how they differ from humans.  For instance:
  • Domestic dog ancestors that prevailed in evolutionary ascent passed along their ability to gulp (bolt) their foods, not chew them (masticate) like humans do.
  • As a result of the successes of their ancestors’ methods of eating (efficiently, quickly) dogs didn’t evolve with a strong ability (or need) to linger over their meals.  So, digestion for dogs begins in the stomach, not in the mouth, as with humans.  Among the notable physiological differences that demonstrate this is the lack of canine salivary α-amylase enzyme, which is responsible for the digestion of carbohydrates (starches) in the mouth
    • As a side note, with this food gulping technique understood, now’s a perfect time to say that grinding of food for dogs (presumably to increase digestion, but far too often to disguise substandard commercial ingredients) probably isn’t nearly as necessary (or beneficial?) for dogs as it may be for humans.  Dogs are adapted to swallow and digest their food in large pieces, and their digestive tracts appear designed to digest large pieces of food quite well.  You can be sure there were no blenders or grinders  on the plains and savannas as dogs integrated into human populations.   It may actually be that we don’t need to try to improve on the type of eating, and the natural bite sizes that dogs perform without us intervening.   Modern dogs’ ancestors did well with their ability to eat and digest plant materials or our dogs wouldn’t have this ability today.  (Personal Note: People ask me about this all the time, after inspection their dog’s droppings.  They’re alarmed to find large pieces of dietary fiber apparently largely intact.  But, this doesn’t mean that the dog didn’t derive nutrition from that food.  (this happens to humans, too).  It may be that pureed fiber may not be as useful for maintaining digestive health as natural bite sized fiber.  In fact, anal gland problems are linked to soft stools.  And, we find, dogs digestive tracts adapt to provide longer transit times to some foods than others, depending on conditions in the tract.  So, what passes today, may not tomorrow.)
  • It’s easy to find people (often with an agenda) who will try to claim that since dogs don’t have mouth-based amylase, it’s some sort of proof that they’re not designed to eat any type of starch or carbohydrate.   Similarly, some of these same authors suggest that dogs’ possession of salivary Lysozyme (an enzyme with antibacterial properties) makes them particularly suited to eat bacteria-laden meats or even carrion.  Both of these assertions about salivary enzymes are wrong.  The saliva of humans and dogs both contain Lysozyme.  But, since dogs’ food doesn’t stay in the mouth long enough for this enzyme to effectively change the bacteria presence in their foods, it’s not really an effective bacteria killer in foods that are bacteria laden.   So, the Lysozyme in dogs’ saliva probably fulfills much the same role for dogs as it does for humans.  That is, it controls the level of bacteria in the mouth — not food — aids the healing of mouth and tongue wounds, and aids the overall health of the mouth.
  • Dogs secrete (among other enzymes) amylase, pepsin, and trypsin into the digestive tract, instead of the mouth.  This fact has a stronger relationship to the way dogs eat (gulping with little or no food linger time in the mouth) than it does with any argument about what they’re supposedly intended to eat.
    • Take particular note of the presence of amylase in the digestive enzymes for dogs.  It’s there because the ancestor to modern dogs were able to eat carbohydrates and, because their bodies produced this enzyme , they survived in their environment to reproduce and pass this ability into the genetic pool that contributed to modern domestic dogs. So, the question of whether dogs were meant to eat carbohydrates is irrelevant.  It’s not a debate. Ancestor dogs with a capacity to digest carbohydrates survived the evolutionary gauntlet, and passed along this ability to modern domestic dogs.  Note that this doesn’t suggest dogs have a need for carbohydrates just that they are perfectly capable and adapted to digest carbohydrates, because their ancestors — over millennia — did.  (Smeets-Peeters, Tim Watson, Mans Minekus, et. al.)
  • Dogs generally have a higher fasting stomach and intestinal pH level than humans.  Many people take this to mean that dogs’ stomachs and intestines are more acidic (and somehow stronger?) than humans’.   Some even try to draw conclusions or suggest that somehow this higher pH is better suited to the digestion of this or that diet for dogs that they’re advocating. Actually, the opposite is true about pH. As pH increases, acidity decreases. So canine gastric acidity (pH avg. 1.8) and intestinal acidity (pH avg. 7.3) is lower than humans (pH avg. 1.1 (gastric) and pH avg. 6.0 (intestinal)) with an empty stomach.  (Chung Y. Lui, Gordon L. Amidon, et. al.)
  • Unlike humans, dogs’ average stomach acidity frequently rises when food enters the stomach, even when the food isn’t acidic itself.
    • Generally, when you introduce food into an acid bath (as when food enters the stomach) the food lowers the acidity of the acid bath, as it, essentially, dilutes the acid.  Dogs’ stomachs make hydrochloric acid fast, though, and their stomach’s overall acidity frequently rises when food enters the stomach.  This means that dogs’ stomachs, on average, pump out hydrochloric acid to aid digestion faster than humans. This is only occasionally true for humans, depending on several factors.  As with α-amylase in the mouth, this finding makes perfect sense in the context of the way dogs eat. Ancestor dogs that secreted higher levels of hydrochloric acid to digest their big, gulped bites, clearly won the evolutionary race to the top.  Note, that this has little to do with whether the food is raw or not.  Human stomachs, and dog stomachs, produce hydrochloric acid strong enough to dissolve metals. Ancestor dogs that secreted more acid faster, and consumed larger bites (ate faster?) won the evolutionary fitness challenge because of the results of this combination of traits, and became the models for modern domestic dogs.  (Kazuko Sagawa, Fasheng Li, et. al)
  • Dogs do better with more meats and fats in their diets than humans do.
    • Dogs really thrive on proteins and fats.  Thankfully, we can provide the benefit of phyto-nutrients to them from natural vegetables and fruits because they can also digest carbohydrates.  But nothing replaces the efficiency and appropriateness of proteins and fats from meat in a dog’s diet.
  • Dogs benefit from some of the same antioxidants and other phyto-nutrients that benefit humans. (Billman, Kang, Leaf)

• Domestic dogs aren’t wolves.  And, the raw meats (and pathogens) in their commercial diets don’t come from wild prey, so comparison of wolves’ immune response to bacteria present in wild prey to the immune response of domestic dogs to strains of bacteria present in domestic meat sources isn’t objective. Raw meat for today’s canine diet comes directly or indirectly from the human food chain, often without some of the safety checks that are designed to protect food intended for humans.  In that food chain there are resistant and extraordinarily virulent strains of bacteria that never existed in wild prey. And, our domestic dogs can and do die from eating these bacteria.  Nobody — even the strongest raw feeding proponent (like I’ve been) can argue that they don’t.  This is the objection you most frequently hear from vets trying to do no harm. Add to this objection the reality that even if your dog is unharmed after ingesting bacteria (like salmonella), you live with your dogs. Already mentioned is the reality that bacteria in our human food supply is increasingly resistant and more virulent, and that, consequently, we can’t compare the immune response of a wild wolf eating wild prey to that of a domestic dog eating raw meat from the human food chain.Couple this with the fact that studies of commercial raw pet foods have quantified the presence of bacteria in raw meats intended for dogs, and have documented the presence of resistant strains of those bacteria in those foods.  Given that dogs shed bacteria (like salmonella) in a variety of ways, care must be taken to avoid exposing yourself or family members to potential dangers from the raw meat and from your dog when he or she eats raw meat.  (R. Finley, R. Reid-Smith, C. Ribble, et. al.)

So, what was my conclusion with all of these observations and notes in mind?  Well, you’ll see it reflected in our freshfetch food.  To us, it makes sense that we apply some of our understanding of science and reality to the feeding of our dogs.  That’s why we’ve created the hybrid preparation that we use for freshfetch.  We gently cook the meats, leaving the amino acid profile of the finished meat virtually identical to that of raw meat, and we leave phyto-nutrient bearing vegetables and fruits largely raw.  This provides meat safety appropriate to the dangers of the today’s meat sources, coupled with the best of raw vegetation, the only source of phyto-nutrients, and the best source of assistive enzymes for humans and for dogs. It’s really the best of raw, and the best of good sense about meats, with little or no sacrifice of nutrition, because nothing’s processed.

What you’re about to read is a different perspective on all of what’s happening around us in the industry.   My hope is that when you’re finished reading here, you’ll want to add to the collective thought about food, safety, and nutrition.

My perspective starts with this idea:  In our zeal to fix what we think we understand is the culprit bacterium of the day, we may be throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater when we believe that the answer to Salmonella in our food is pressure processing that essentially sterilizes.  

ALL of what you’re about to read is based upon a presumption that I believe is a safe one.  That presumption is that we just don’t know enough about how microbes work symbiotically,  collectively, suppressively, and synergistically in the bodies of living things to be able to determine which ones should be eradicated from our foods.  Certainly, we should think very carefully about sterilizing our foods using either excessive heat or excessive pressure (both of which, incidentally, immobilize enzymes, too.)

Microbes are present in virtually all living things.  Mammalian immune systems strive to reach a manageable point of  suppression of microbes that may be virulent, but never eradicates  them from the host organism.  And, there’s strong evidence that microbes work symbiotically with their hosts and with one another in many living systems.

Salmonella is the culprit of the day.  But that spotlight has been shared with E. Coli, and will likely be shared Campylobacter or another bacterium at some time.  News of sickened humans and pets is tragic and I, in no way, wish to suggest that we should overlook outbreaks of illness caused by negligence or error in the way that our industries handle foods. 

But sterilizing our food of all microbes before we consider it safe to eat may create a bigger demon than the one we think we’re banishing.

Did you know:

• that bacteria produce various types of natural antibiotics, some of which we have yet to discover;
• that bacteria manufacture various types of enzymes;
• that even bacteria considered virulent when present in sufficient numbers to cause illness may work to suppress the virulence of another microbe;
• that E.Coli is present in the digestive tract of virtually every living mammal and at least one serovar of E. Coli may aid in the production of Adenosine Thiamine Triphosphate in mammals

For clarity’s sake, please understand that I’m not suggesting that all bacteria are desirable in our foods.  Certainly, the virulence of  E. Coli O157:H7 is a stark and clear reminder of the dangers that lie in the microbial world.  But consider this: canines and humans alike would have no resistance to any bacterium or virus protein if  they were never encountered .

So here comes the most controversial of the points I wish to make.  It may be more worthwhile and useful for us to find a way to manage the presence of microbes in our food, instead of trying to eradicate them.  By properly managing the food production chain — including pre-testing foods before they enter the processing cycle, we could divert food sources with detected dangerous levels of virulent microbes, and sterilize those foods only, perhaps mixing them back into a batch of foods containing safe levels and natural compositions of microbes.

Otherwise, we may be creating food sources that fail to initiate and maintain necessary metabolic & and biological processes so subtle - and poorly understood – that they defy articulation.

We’re just not that smart about all of this.

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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Now, allow me please to remind you that I have been known to be a staunch proponent of raw diets for dogs — until just recently, that is.

What changed my mind?  Nothing.  I haven’t exactly changed my mind.  I think I’ve just become more willing to challenge some of the almost fanatical early thinking and, yes, excitement that engulfed many of us when we first started to see raw diets become better understood, and more commonly fed to deserving dogs.

So, without having changed my mind, here’s my best articulation of the new place in which I find myself:

Some of the place I find myself rests upon an assumption that we cast vested interest, self-interest, and ulterior motive aside when choosing food for our companion dogs.  This means that I assume people generally want to feed the best nutrition to their companions, and that assumption becomes a major premise upon which dependent decisions are judged.

That being said, it’s understandable that the complexity of the question of canine nutrition (compounded by the realities that different breeds have clearly different nutritional needs) would cause great consternation and confusion as it’s being deconstructed in an effort to educate oneself.  So, it follows that frustration leads to one clever proclivity to minimalism.

A minimalist tendency attempts to simplify things, to get to their heart or root.  Then, we reason, we might be able to understand the most basic things and address them.  We believe that in doing so, more complex dependencies will self-address, so we won’t have to worry about them — much.

I think that this tendency to minimalism and simplification has made raw feeding attractive.   When Ian Billinghurst cleverly spun BARF into a memorable, understandable, and logical story about wolves and dogs, it had resonance.  And, it fed a need to be able to understand before we act.

Sixteen years later, we have had the opportunity to examine Dr. Billinghurst’s ideas, and to glean the benefit from the risk.  When I set out to judge the risk/value ratio in feeding raw meat vs. cooked meat, I wanted to find empirical evidence that showed that feeding raw meat provided better nutrition than feeding cooked meat provided.  After all, if I’m going to risk parasites and bacterial infection for dogs, there had better be a good reason for doing so.

Breaking down meat nutrition boils down to knowing about the amino acid content in the meat under scrutiny.  Amino acids, the building blocks of protein, are the product of meat digestion.  The digested meat transitions from polypeptide (proteins) into peptides (amino acid chains) and finally, into amino acids.  This, simplified, is the process of digestion.

So, it helps to see a laboratory analysis of the amino acids present in meat.  And it would help even more to compare amino acids present in a specific raw meat, with the amino acids present in the same meat after it’s cooked!  Now THAT would tell us something about how cooking changes the value of meat proteins, right?

So, let’s compare.  These images show the amino acid profiles of RAW meat (it’s Beef Top Round, trimmed to 1/8″ fat), and the same meat after cooking. 

What you’ll find is that the profile of the amino acids are VIRTUALLY IDENTICAL.  What’s interesting, though, is that the consumed mass required to meet the same caloric value (in this example, 1000 kcal) is higher in the RAW meat than in the cooked meat.  So, the density of the amino acid value is GREATER in the cooked version than the raw, when feeding to satisfy caloric requirements (which, don’t we all do?!). 

So, why all the rage over RAW?  So many people can’t be influenced by what appears to be mass hysteria, can they?  Well, no.  I don’t think so.  Instead, I think that a lot of very conscientious people simply noticed that real meat (and real food) provides better nutrition than any of the commerical foods have for years and years.  I think of it as I would for myself.  If all I ate was fast food, with no vegetables (except french fries!), and lots of really horrible ingredients like trans-fats, my body would certainly do better if I started eating raw meat, vegetables, and grains.  But, how wise would that be?

Now chimes in the chorus of “dogs have digestive tracts that are designed to eat raw foods” singers.  I know.  I know.  But there are still tons of veterinarians warning that raw food isn’t the best choice for domesticated dogs.  Some of them even have to tell us to take a look at our dogs and ask ourselves “does my dog look like a wolf?”  And these, are good, caring, often holistic veterinarians, with no commercial corporate asset tag attached.

It’s something to ask ourselves.  Are we getting smarter about RAW?

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Doing that starts with the Food Observation Report.  Food Observation Reports connect information that you observe about a specific food with a specific breed of dog at a particular stage of life and health. 

You can find the link for Food Observation Report in the left margin of every page in this site.  When you click the link, you’ll see a step-by-step survey appear.  By answering the questions in the survey, you’ll provide observations that can be used to analyze the food you report as it relates to the nutrition and/or viability for the breed of dog you report about.

This simple process provides quantifiable evidence about specific foods as they relate to specific breeds of dogs.  We use this information, after analysis and validation, to inform our process for creating recipes for ever better dog food.

It’s a community effort!

To get the most from this site, we ask you to share information with the rest of the community. We’ll use this information to encourage discussion, to validate your observations, and, ultimately to adapt our recipes to make freshfetch food better for all of our companion dogs. 

We’re making this up as we go along.

No pet food company has ever done what we’re doing. We’re using your observations to guide our research into foods that work, and foods that don’t work for dogs.  Along the way we’ll consult with veterinarians, nutritionists, breeders, and most importantly, you.

We’re excited!  So, again, welcome.

Jay & Mike
Owners
freshfetch Pet Foods, Inc.