Pet Food Recalls, Canine Nutrition, Ingredients Analysis

FDA DOG DIETS AND HEART DISEASE

You know fatty food causes heart disease but your dog hates peas and potatoes so here is a FREE dietary solution and why it is hard to find it online…

November 23, 2018

Stella Starr, Pet Perspectives

The October 2018 American Kennel Club <enews@akc.org> blast must have been generated by the FDA article which postulated a potential connection between “canine dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM)” in dogs eating “peas, lentils, other legume seeds, or potatoes as main ingredients.”

Thank you AKC for “potentially” offending the financially supportive dog food makers but it isn’t just dogs. No cat would ever eat a bean yet they are increasingly stricken with cardiomyopathy (currently over 10%) and shame on the cat registries for having no FINDABLE information on feline cardiomyopathy!

The AVMA says “Cats and at least some dogs can develop dilated cardiomyopathy if their diets contain too little taurine, an amino acid found in meat and milk.”

As 2018 draws to a close FDA is bravely making the connection between diet and heart disease but as a cat breeder, I can tell you it isn’t exactly NEWS. They learned decades ago to put taurine in cat food because more than dogs, cats require that kind of amino acid. Searching for heart disease in cats, I found this online so for you cat owners, note this “cats were suddenly dying with previously unknown heart and thyroid problems until a researcher tumbled to the fact that cat food lacked taurine. Is it coincidence that the critter highest in taurine is a mouse?” ^{{ref #1}}

Did you get it? That balance in nature thing? Cats, big and small, love rodents.  Mice and rats are full of taurine. Humans obsessively poison and trap those rodents.

Then we invented pet food... The diet of early man vs. modern man and the horrible increase in diseases is not a “potential connection”, it is a statistically suppressed but easily found FACT. When the human species evolved to eat meat as well as vegetation, we got smarter. Our brain actually grew bigger and we became not just clever, we became cunning, some would say more like cats than dogs…

This is a dog-site so I will stick to that but every cat owner will tell you cats eat meat and fish, not vegetables. Cat food makers understand this and so the fish and meat content in cat food is generally higher than in dog food.

The FDA report describes this form of canine heart disease as “Canine DCM is a disease of a dog's heart muscle and results in an enlarged heart.”

The point is that it looks like they try to shift blame onto genetics instead of where it belongs.

It is not like the FDA doesn't know but still they sent this to my veterinarian “canine dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) in dogs eating certain pet foods containing peas, lentils, other legume seeds, or potatoes...” I have to hand it to them. FDA knows dogs and cats would only eat that stuff if they were starving.

My point is that heart disease seems to be more common in dogs today and it has to be the diet, just as it usually is in people. Fat is filling, and cheap.

We know that fatty foods cause heart disease and while cats and dogs are carnivores, they don’t eat much of the fatty tissue that surrounds the organs. It is called visceral fat and although some say we need fat to help keep us warm, too much is bad for the heart.

Most owners feed “dog food” to their dogs, especially big ones. Who could afford to feed a mastiff just meat? Actually, wild dogs consume vegetation from their prey’s innards. Even big cats get some vegetation that way and cats will also eat grass and some herbs just like dogs do. What they don’t eat is a lot of the fat. Now that I think about it, wild grass-eaters are never “fat” so there’s that.

The more we think about what we feed our pets today, the more we must realize that wheat or any grains (is corn a grain?) are not on the list of edibles for carnivores! Have you EVER seen a FAT wild cat, wolf, tiger, coyote? No. So how dare we let cat food and dog food makers load the can with grain and fat? You do what you want to but your pets (and all breeding stock) should be on a “low-fat diet” for heart health and fertility! I hope this “dog diet” helps your heart health too.

Ref #1 FDA Investigating Potential Connection Between Diet and Canine Heart Disease (offsite link opens in window)

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