#science diet royal canin and purina are garbage

[sga-owns-my-soul]

working in the pet industry is fun cause like on the one hand, i'm not a vet and you should always always always listen to what your vet recommends over anyone else, ESPECIALLY pet store employees, because vets are licensed and educated professionals

that being said

most vets (where i live) know literally nothing about pet nutrition and they recommend the literal worst quality brands on the market and it's physically painful having to listen to someone say SCIENCE DIET is the best quality food for their cat

[theonewhopoops]

Boy oh boy: I've worked in pet speciality for years and lemme tell you. So many consumers are not aware of the ingredients of their pups' foods. Purina, Science Diet, and Royal Canin are over priced and almost entirely filler and garbage.

If price is not an issue for you, there's WAY better food available for not much more. But if you need budget food, at LEAST get something like Taste of the Wild or Victor's. They're a 0retty good price for significantly healthier food.

Don’t pay for Purina pro plan in this economy. Their prices are insane and corn is in the first six ingredients of every recipe as a useless filler. The food is not even comparable to others in that price range in terms of nutrition. It isn’t even comparable to food >20% less expensive. Save your money and buy Taste of the Wild, Victor, or Merrick if you have money to kill or grab 4Health or Diamond Naturals if you don’t. You absolutely do not have to be overpaying a greedy corporation for mid dog and cat food.

[deansmom]

here’s a quick and easy shortcut for figuring out if you’re using a good dog food: how high up on the ingredients list is corn? dogs can’t digest corn and gain almost no nutritional value from it whatsoever and it’s generally used to hold the shape of the kibble. it’s high in calories, not very filling and high in fiber so your dog eats more because they’re going to the bathroom more but the only nutritional value they’re gaining from it is calories they probably don’t need. 

and good dog food isn’t always expensive but yeah, going up to a higher quality food isn’t cheap because they have to use other things to help the kibble maintain its shape. for example this is a huge gigantic monstrous jump in quality of dog food but look at the difference between beneful and pedigree’s ingredients list and wellness core’s ingredients

beneful (~$25-30 for 30lb bag)

pedigree ($25 for a 50lb bag)

wellness core (~$65-70+ for 18lb bag)

and just for giggles here’s one of rachel ray’s foods (which I call the “decent supermarket food” bc while it still has corn too high on the ingredients list it’s significantly better than the other garbage) (~$10-30 depending on size/sub-brand)

and then there’s the foods we feed my dogs which are good foods but not as expensive as CORE is

nutro farm’s harvest (lamb) (~$43-56 for 24lb that lasts around a month and a half for two large dogs)

and nulo (lamb) (~$60 for 22lb bag that lasts about a month and a half for two large dogs)

remember how I said that decent food doesn’t always have to be super expensive? authority is a great option for a decent quality of food for a decent price (somewhere around $30-35 for a 30/34lb bag of food)

I get it, it feels ridiculous to spend $60 on a bag of dog food every month or it may just be out of your price range. but when you feed them a higher quality food, you also don’t have to feed them as much of it because it’s more nutritionally packed and satisfying.

tl;dr look at the ingredients on the bag of dog food you have sitting in the pantry/kitchen/garage and if corn shows up in the first twenty ingredients (you really want it to be out of the first ten but if it’s closer to twenty that’s okayish), do some research and see if you can find a better food that’s within your budget. and yeah, you may have to go to a pet store to buy the food or order it online (chewy and amazon have automated delivery services and they’re generally at least a little cheaper than the brick-and-mortar stores). if you can buy your food at the supermarket (with like two exceptions), walmart, target, a gas station, etc, it’s probably not a very good food.

also don’t bother wasting your money on

royal canin (dog or cat) - is this a bad food? no. is this a food that is worth the price they’re charging? absolutely not.

science diet - [jpad voice] trash trash trash trash

iams - GARBAGE

kibbles ‘n bits - GARBAGE

puppy/dog chow - GARBAGE

there are (obviously) other important things that make a good dog food a good dog food but the fastest cheatsheet is: does it have corn in it and can I buy it at walmart? if the answer is yes, your dog deserves a better food. 

p.s. cats are carnivores so there should be little to no carbs in their food

[dirtyhecker]

i'd like to say just don't buy any grocery brand of pet food out there. by that i mean if you can buy it at the grocery store, just don't touch it. go to the pet store, get nutro, wellness, royal canin, blue buffalo, etc., and ignore the science diet, eukanuba, purina, iams and all garbage brands.

[ms-demeanor]

OH GOD PET NUTRITION

Okay sorry ah aaaah okay

OKAY pet nutrition is a fucking garbage fever swamp and there is so much yelling I could do about it but @drferox has covered the subject in great detail on her blog but the long and the short of it is this:

The vast majority of bog-standard pedigree/purina/science diet/royal canin/iams dog food that is out there on the market is genuinely seriously lifetime tested to be complete healthy nutrition for nearly all dogs. There ARE dogs who have food allergies, but those brands ALSO generally have lines formulated for dogs with allergies that are ALSO lifetime tested with real dogs.

The grain-free, raw-influenced, small-brand, instagram influencer style pet food is by and large expensive bullshit that we don't 100% know how well it interacts with dogs because most (all?) of those brands have never done lifetime feeding trials.

Like. Basic-ass pedigree kibble is fine for your dog. It is great for your dog. You aren't a bad pet owner if you're getting your dog pedigree.

There are brands that aren't great (Ceasar's comes to mind - it's generally really fatty with low protein) but people make a huge stink about byproducts and organ meat and corn and rice in dog food and that is all fine stuff for dogs to have. Dogs can have cartiladge ground up and put in food! Dogs can have corn! Dogs can have skin! Dogs can have bone marrow! Dogs can have stomach and lungs and tripe! The pink slime that people freak out about isn't even bad for people and it isn't bad for your dog to eat mechanically processed meat byproducts mixed in with corn and potatoes and gravy.

Again, there are dogs who have allergies and those dogs are a special case. There are dogs who are on kidney diets or low fat diets and they are special cases; if your dog has a serious nutrition related disorder you should talk to your veterinarian about the food that is right for your dog. Your veterinarian gets so much more education about animal nutrition than your GP gets about human nutrition that it is nuts. You can (generally) trust your vet about food for your pet (though if they are recommending a diet that seems a bit off the wall you might want to seek a second opinion).

But yeah, grain free and raw food pet people are the anti-vaxxers of the canine community (and sometimes they're also the literal anti-vaxxers of the canine community!). There is very little evidence to any of their claims and attempting to follow their advice can seriously sicken or injure your pet.

Do you have any takes on this "grains are inflammatory" stuff I'm seeing?

Inflammation is one of those health and wellness words that isn't quite a red flag but is nonetheless a red flag to me.

It turns out the whole reason I got into the skeptic thing in the first place is because I got diagnosed with celiac disease and there was so much medical misinformation and bullshit woo associated with trying to research how I was going to have to change my diet that I've been angry ever since.

If you have a grain allergy or intolerance or a condition like celiac disease then (some) grains can cause inflammation. However, consuming whole grains is strongly linked with reduced inflammation.

It really depends on the context you're seeing it in though. If you're seeing it alongside phrases like "leaky gut" and "toxins" it is bullshit (toxins, by the way, is the major red flag for all if this. If someone is saying 'toxins' without defining the toxin or the dose at which it is toxic, they are full of shit). If you're seeing "inflammation" alongside words like "chronic," "systemic," and "antioxidant" you're in yellow flag territory - there's likely at least some reality at the center of the discussion. If you're seeing "inflammation" alongside words like "cilia" or "duodenum" or "cardiopulmonary" you're probably looking at something reasonable.

Because, like, yeah, wheat can cause an inflammatory bronchial response (an asthma attack) in someone with a wheat allergy and asthma, or a catastrophic, systemic inflammatory response (anaphylaxis) in someone with a severe allergy, but "grains are inflammatory" is the kind of statement that is so broad and covers such a wide variety of potential inflammatory agents that it needs some pretty extraordinary proof.

Actually here's a really good litmus test for a lot of this stuff:

Ask if the thing in question is something that humans have consumed for a long time.

Ask if humans are consuming more of it or less of it than they did before the industrial revolution (or whenever the thing in question was introduced).

Ask if the supposed effect has become more prevalent since the industrial revolution (or whenever the thing in question was introduced).

Ask if anything else might have caused the effect described.

So, for instance, one of the claims I'm looking at is "aspartame causes brain cancer"

Okay, well, are people consuming more aspartame now than they did in the 50s. Are brain cancer rates higher than they were in the 1950s? Not anymore than would be explained by improved diagnosis, really. There are some places that have really high and unusual rates of brain cancer; are these places where they consume more aspartame? Nope, they usually tend to be places that were significantly polluted by chemical manufacturers.

So let's look at grains:

Humans have consumed grains for a long time.

Humans are probably consuming similar amounts of grain to what they have always consumed; staple foods are pretty stable and grains are a staple food.

Has inflammation become more prevalent now than it was in the past? That's hard to say because it's an ill-defined term, but most people who make these claims claim that inflammation increases all-cause mortality, cancer, heart disease, etc. Well, the rates of all of those things have been going down, and life expectancy and survival for those things has been increasing, so it seems unlikely that inflammation from grains is causing the kinds of things people who make the "grains are inflammatory" argument are worried about.

[grody-cosplay-n-crap]

I need to reblog this, not to argue for blue buffalo, but to make sure to point out they do NOT represent smaller holistic dog food companies. Blue got big fast, and has been overpriced for what it is for years. Just this year they were bought by General Mills (their first pet food purchase) following the trend of pet food being owned by giant food conglomerates. When companies are bought like this quality ALWAYS goes down. But my main point I want to make is that even though blue has some serious problems the solution is NOT to fall back on the 'well known' brands instead. I'm talking Purina, Eukanuba, Pedigree, Science Diet, Royal Canin anything you see ads for on tv really. These foods have killed countless animals over the years, have had innumerable recalls and in general are full of garbage ingredients. They also have TONS of money, and use that money for gigantic marketing campaigns and to sponsor vet schools. Yes your vet will probably recommend one of these, no it's not their fault, yes you should take it with a grain of salt. Vet schools need money, vets have to learn so much and these companies provide funding AND their own nutritional education. Most vet schools have their nutrition classes taught by private companies. But that's a whole other subject. What I really want to get at is DO YOUR RESEARCH, and I'm saying this as someone who was working with animals for YEARS before I really started learning about nutrition and there was SO MUCH I was not aware of. Always look up who owns the company, it is very often not who you think. Look up recalls, they are easily available online. Turn the bag around and READ THE INGREDIENTS never take the name of the product at face value. If there is an ingredient you don't understand, look it up. There are legal definitions for everything. And keep in mind you CAN find a quality healthy holistic food that is what it says it is and will vastly improve your animals health, you just have to look harder.

Here is a basic list of companies in "big pet food" keep in mind there are WAY more things these companies own than what I'm listing. Also keep in mind this doesn't include the TONS of treats they own

-Nestle(you know the ones stealing water from the great lakes and use slave labor for their chocolate) : Purina ( dog chow cat chow, Purina one, pro plan) beneful, merrick, alpo

Mars ( the guys that make M&Ms): Royal Canin, Eukanuba, Pedigree, Nutro, Iams ( many of these were bought from proctor and gamble several years ago)

Colgate Palmolive (aka toothpaste and dish soap): Hills Science Diet

J.M. Smuckers (big heart pet brands): Natural Balance, Gravy Train, meow mix, kibbles n bits, natures recipe, nutrish

Keep yourself educated and don't let greedy companies influence the health of your pet!

PLEASE BE CAREFUL FOR ANYONE WHO USES “BLUEBUFFALO” FOR THEIR DOGS!!