01/12/2022
**The emotional aspect of dog feeding**
I'm a canine anthropologist at heart, I love watching dogs - and working out what humans need to help connect with them in rhythm and flow.
I have always been a nutrition and supplement geek but not so with my four legged friends.....this article by Dr. Conor Brady at Dogs First gives an insight why.
Unlike us, dogs don't experience intellectual interference when it comes to food! As pets, they rely on us to feed them - here's where it gets complicated. Humans love to buy things for their dogs...and obsess over their food.
This shared article speaks of zinc supplementation and how it is becoming popular with raw feeders. Essentially the mechanism of mineral absorption is misunderstood and the human defers to label dosage without wider research.
One thing we can be sure of is that dogs - like humans - do not need large amounts of crispy, processed, dehydrated foodstuffs.
Gut health and behavioural/emotional/psychological health are connected - the growing bodies of work in human science demonstrates this. We may not be as blessed in the canine world with the quantity of academic papers but there are many ethical, educated practitioners in this field.
Emotional recommendations from humans who worry about food may be worth a second thought.....the same goes for a sparkly advertising campaign.
Do your own research and check in with someone who can critically evaluate information if needed.
Zinc is a crucial micronutrient in the diet. It’s important for pretty much everything but no time for that now.
The point is, AAFCO, the sort-of regulatory body made up of candy company execs that oversee the quality of dry pet food in the US (FEDIAF over here but it's based largely on AAFCO guidelines too), say you need LOTS AND LOTS of zinc in the diet.
In fact, the MINIMUM amount of zinc AAFCO say you can include in pet food (dry or raw) is 120mg/kg of dry matter. This is a problem as studies show no prey animal contains anywhere near that amount of zinc. In fact, most (bar oysters, hardly common prey of the dog, but are unbelievably high in zinc for some reason!) contain less than half that amount. Even most plant ingredients fail to get close.
So it seems, once again, the dog's natural diet is potentially deficient in something and the candy companies, thankfully, have improved on silly mother nature...once again.
But, as with most things pet food, all is not what it seems.
AAFCOs' minimum estimates (we say estimates as the science backing most of their decisions is truly woeful and of course they are only minimums, not Recommended Daily Amounts, we still today don't know ANY of those. Not one, Honestly!) are based on studies of dry-fed dogs fed ultra-processed pet foods that use artificial, conical flask versions of nutrients, such as zinc oxide instead of naturally occurring zinc.
The body does not like minerals. They are inorganic, i.e. not from the land of the living. The gut only permits them entry if they are chelated to a carbon molecule. These the body trusts. Carbon molecules ARE invited to the party and minerals simply tag along with it (even though the mineral is the one with the tunes!!).
The problem is, at least for our pets consuming these very poor foodstuffs, chelated minerals are pricier to make. So your pets tend to get things like zinc and iron oxide (aka rust!). We know dogs only absorb around 10% of the zinc oxide fed to them. Compare this to 20-40% of the natural zinc fed to them (zinc from meat is better absorbed than zinc from plants…).
This means raw-fed dogs get FOUR TIMES the zinc from their diet compared to their dry-fed counterparts eating dry pet food with Goerge Jetson-esque mineral pill additions. So what some view as a diet deficient in zinc is actually a diet that contains plenty of zinc just in its more bioavailable form.
Red meat and poultry are the best sources of zinc so a raw dog food diet made up on meat, bone, organ and a bit of veg, contains more than enough zinc for the average healthy dog, I assure you (though do check out Note 3 below re Northern Breeds).
Of late, there has been a surge of folk to real feeding. It's great news. But unfortunately, many seem to come with large, NASA-like Excel spreadsheets of exact vitamin and mineral demands of their dog (there is no formulator on the planet that can tell you the nutrient content of your food, particularly US ones....eg comparing CAFO beef to my grass fed stuff? A crappy greenhouse blueberry grown in dirt poor soils versus these wild ones I feed?! And this iswe before you discuss storage, age at consumption, preparation etc etc).
I worry this needlessly detailed / scientific approach to dinner time has fuelled the development of Pet Food PTSD in owners.
The AAFCO guidelines are for dry food manufacturers, nobody else. They do not apply to folk feeing real food. In fact, if anything they are misleading. Folk are now driving themselves mad trying to find enough zinc or vitamin E (another one where the natural form is significantly better absorbed...) to keep the AAFCO minimum protocol happy when they are comparing apples and oranges.
If you only knew the slap-dash, mish-mash info the guidelines are based on, from an insane focus on MINIMUM protein (who would want to feed their kids the minimum amount of this nutrient), to maximums based on pigs and virtually zero info on the micro minerals, it's all nutritional gobbledy g**k that would never be permitted in human nutrition. It was invented to get pet food quality off the floor in the 70's (when tens of thousands of cats and dogs were dying for want of taurine...) but has evolved little from that point.
[For anyone still confused over the AAFCO requirements, or believing they have some relevance, please check out my new course on "AAFCO and the "complete" myth". Proving popular!
https://dogsfirst.ie/courses/aafco-the-complete-myth/]
As you walk into the light you need to leave all that sort of stuff behind.
Folk naturally say "but what else do we have to direct us"... and the answer is, very little!
Not very assuring Conor! We were looking for a little more!
I don't have it. All I can say is - don't worry. We don't know the vitamin and mineral requirements of the kids let alone where to source those nutrients or how much is in their food at the time of feeding....and yet they're doing fine (albeit we all wish they ate more veg...!).
We tend to work more with food pyramids and the dog's pyramid happens has meat at the bottom.
That will have to do for now.
***
Note 1: For an exact understanding of what exactly a dog might eat, I have a course for that too...it comes with the entire first section of my book!!
https://dogsfirst.ie/courses/what-do-dogs-eat/
Note 2: An understanding of vitamin and mineral needs does become important during sickness, for sure, some diseases drain this or that. We then turn on to it. But in your average healthy dog, we go for balance over time by varying the bits fed.
Note 3: ZRD is an issue in Northern breeds (huskies and Malanutes) where intestinal absorption is affected and zinc, for whatever reason, is poorly absorbed. Digging into this now - I want to see if zinc deficiency is common in raw-fed dogs...(Edit: seems like it does occur in raw-fed dogs....next up...is it as common and why?!)
