Raw Pet Foods – What Does the Science Really Say?
Mar 27, 2018 --
Both the Alberta and Canadian Veterinary Medical associations have been targeting raw pet foods of late, claiming they are unsafe due to potential exposure of owners and their pets to food-borne pathogens. Despite any good intentions, these articles and position statements actually do the public a disservice, because the implication is that the converse must also be true. That is, feeding canned and kibble diets must be safe, if raw foods are unsafe. This is not at all the case, as any brief investigation will reveal.
For example, only 1 of the 17 pet food recalls reported by the FDA in 2017 was a raw food company. The company in question is located in Oregon. No illnesses arose from consumption of the food. It was the company’s own internal monitoring that detected higher than acceptable numbers of Salmonella, prompting the company to pull the food from the shelves.
The other 16 recalls were of canned and dry foods and treats, for a number of reasons, ranging from the presence of Salmonella and Listeria to metal fragments and phenobarbital. More foods had to be recalled due to phenobarbital residues than for any other reason. A few years ago, it was melamine in canned and dry foods that was the problem. Thousands of dogs and cats died. Veterinarians happily endorse those same foods today – in fact, they never stopped! But can you imagine the hue and cry if it was a raw food manufacturer that was the guilty party back then?
Here is a list of pet food recalls dating back several years: https://www.dogfoodadvisor.com/dog-food-recalls/
You’ll notice that the vast number of recalls were for canned dog food and treats, none of which have ever been targeted by the CVMA and AVMA. Certainly some raw brands are on the list, but they are uncommon. Just as frequently appearing are household names like Iams, Purina and Hill’s, which most veterinarians happily recommend, in spite of this data. These companies have a much broader reach, however, affecting many more dogs and cats than small boutique raw food manufacturers. Much more harm has been done by feeding canned and kibble diets than has ever been incurred by feeding raw diets.
Not to belabor the point, but, but a study published by U of A grad student Bushra Alam found that of the four pet foods recalled in Canada since 2012 for the presence of Salmonella, three were dry dog foods.
The bottom line is that no food is immune from bacterial contamination, so this issue really needs to be taken off the table as a reason to feed one food over another. Controls are in place in all industries, including the best of the raw pet food manufacturers, to limit bacterial exposure. Veterinarians like to think of themselves as scientists, but our turning a blind eye to these facts reveals us to be anything but. True scientists don’t have biases.
How would a true scientist investigate the merits of feeding of raw pet foods? Surely they wouldn’t do yet another test to see if they could find bacteria in the food. After three decades of doing that, I think we can finally safely assume the answer is ‘yes’, although the actual counts of bacteria in frozen raw foods are generally small. That is why they are recalled only infrequently.
Instead, I feel a scientist would ask “Why are people feeding raw petfood?”. Consumer surveys have found that ninety percent of people are aware of the risk of bacterial contamination of raw food. A scientist would surely ask what possible benefit could arise from feeding raw foods that consumers would consider it worth the risk.
If we search up ‘raw pet food’ in a medical research database like Pubmed, we find the usual tedious reporting of the presence of bacteria in raw meat. Discussions of health benefits are absent, as veterinarians continue to gleefully report. If, however, we stop focusing on the word ‘raw’, and instead search for evidence of the negative effects of food processing on health, we not surprisingly find thousands of articles. Included among them are articles on the deleterious effects of food processing on canine physiology.
The weight of the evidence supports what most consumers would consider obvious – the more unadulterated whole foods you eat, the healthier you are. It’s not the ‘raw’ that’s important. It’s whether a food is processed. Homemade diets that aren’t loaded with carbs would be expected to create the same benefits in a dog or cat as a raw diet, and those benefits turn out to be just ‘avoidance of problems’ that processed diets create.
I’m embarrassed to say that I was once a veterinarian who toed the line and spouted the usual biased rhetoric currently rampant in our profession against raw foods, all the while thinking that I was a good little scientist. It took the clinical experiences of my wife, colleague, and EHVC co-owner Kären Marsden, to show me the light.
Kären had patients that were sick for years with inflammatory bowel disease become normal within a few days of a switch to raw. These animals did not lack for the best efforts of our city veterinarians, who had gone to the lengths of even putting the animals on chemotherapy to try to shut down their exuberant inflammatory responses.
The most recent of these miracle cures was just a few weeks ago, which several city veterinarians bore witness to. It turns out that high insulin levels are a big driver of both acute and chronic inflammation as well as obesity, and raw diets excel at keeping insulin levels low by being digested much more slowly. THAT’S why these diets are popular. Know anyone with an overweight or inflamed cat or dog? Search a medical database for articles on the link between inflammation and insulin, and you’ll find tens of thousands.
These patients of Kären’s are now free of medication and truly healthy for the first time in their lives. Note that, contrary to what we are all told to expect, none of these chemotherapy-treated raw fed cats keeled over from Salmonellosis.
Why isn’t this research collated, packaged, and disseminated to veterinarians? Let’s just say there is a ‘financial disincentive’ to do so. Veterinarians don’t feel they have the time to read research on nutrition, so they rely on pet food companies to inform them. As for manufacturers of processed pet foods, they know the information I’ve shared here, but are not about to publicize it – it would be corporate suicide.
So long as big money is at stake and so long as owners want to save time or effort by feeding cheap convenient foods to their pets, canned and dry dog and cat foods are not going away. Fair enough. Let’s just be honest about the real reasons these diets are promoted. But as for them being safer and lower in bacteria counts than raw diets, enough already. They aren’t. Ten minutes of unbiased scientific investigation shows it.
Steve Marsden
DVM ND MSOM LAc DiplCH CVA
