freshfetch Village

Alas, another pet food recall fills the headlines.  And all the loving, conscientious people in the industry are scrambling to know what to do – and how — to fix whatever’s wrong with the supply chain that helps all of us feed our loved ones.

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.

Wow.  I get the question about grain so much that I just thought it was time to write some of what I’ve learned by searching for the truth behind all of the scariness and market spin out there.

If you’re not inclined to like to read long blogs, here’s the condensed answer: Whole Grains, like Oats and Barley, are good for the vast majority of dogs.

That being said, and if you’re still reading, I assume  you want the detail, so here goes. 

How Grains got a Bad Reputation in Dog Food

So many dogs are sensitive to grain these days that it seems to be an epidemic of sensitivity.  How could this be?  If grains are good for the vast majority of dogs, why do so many dogs seem to be sensitive to grain?  The answer lies in a short discussion of how the canine (and human) immune response works.

When mammals’ bodies are exposed to foreign material, they are capable of mounting immune system defenses against that material if it cannot be identified or in some way used, ignored without consequence, or metabolized by the body on a cellular or molecular level.

Foreign material that is capable of causing an immune response in your dog could be an environmental substance like a chemical, an organism like bacteria or virii, or a protein  that is present in food.  Since we’re discussing grains, as foods, we’ll ignore any discussion of chemicals or organisms and concentrate on how a dog’s body might respond to the proteins of grains when they’re consumed.

To do that, let’s discuss digestion first.

How Proteins Become Nutrition

To be useful as a source of nutrition for our dogs, protein needs to become amino acids.  You may know that amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, which exist in virtually every structure in mammal bodies.  So, the use of protein as a food involves a round trip from protein to amino acid and back to protein.

Amino Acids, Peptides, and Poly-Peptides

Proteins are long chains of amino acids.  Think of them as you would a chain with different sized links.  Each link with a different size represents a particular type of amino acid.  When you think about proteins in this way, you can see that if we just start hacking at the chain in mid-link we’re going to hack apart an amino acid.  The key to breaking proteins into amino acids that will be useful to re-build proteins is to hack the chains apart in specific places.  When protein chains are broken apart, they form smaller chains called peptides.  Ultimately, when peptides are broken apart between our example “links”, they form amino acids.  So, another name for a protein is a “poly” (or many) peptide chain.  So you may read about proteins as polypeptides.  Neat,  huh? 

Enter the Enzyme

Most people know something about enzymes.  People buy bottled enzyme supplements to assist digestion for their dogs, when their dogs aren’t getting good assistive digestive enzyme loading from their food.  Most people don’t realize that enzymes are proteins, too.

One special digestive enzyme, trypsin, is designed to break peptide or polypeptide chains apart specifically at the boundaries between amino acids, leaving amino acids where the peptides were.  Before the trypsin can work, though, other digestive enzymes and assistive enzymes go to work on the polypeptides breaking them into different sized peptides, but usually with a specific size or length, and usually between amino acid boundaries. 

How does an enzyme know where to break the polypeptide apart?  It’s chemical, my dear Watson.  Enzymes break peptides apart (or CLEAVE peptides) at known sites along the peptide or polypeptide chain.  Disgestive enzymes are the product of evolutionary development, and at this stage in the process, the enzymes cleave known proteins at precise points along the protein chains.  By cleaving at known sites in the chains, the resulting peptides or amino acids are useful to the body as nutrition, and are not, generally seen as irritants.

Poison Processing

Ok, poison may be too strong a word, but it will illustrate my point here.

We’ve learned that proteins become amino acids when they’re broken apart correctly.  But what happens if proteins are broken apart almost randomly?  Nutrional chaos, that’s what happens.  Heat, pressure, chemical treatments, or, often, a combination of all of these, used in the processing of grains breaks grain proteins into peptide fragments that aren’t able to be cleaved properly by digestive enzymes, in a process known as hydrolysis.  So, the fragments pass through the digestive tract without the digestive attention they deserve. 

In fact, read this discussion of food processing, taken from a publication by Dr. Rattan Chand, a principal scientist in microbiology and food science at the National Dairy Research Institute in Karnal, India:

The structural and chemical changes that occur during the processing of food proteins may result in the release of bioactive peptides. In particular, heat and/or alkali treatment can generate additional inter-and intramolecular covalent bonds that are resistant to hydrolysis. Such processing conditions also promote the racemic conversion of L-amino acids to D-isomers and consequently, lead to indigestible peptide bonds.

Protein fragments that are indigestible would provoke an immune response in a dog’s body.  Now that might be our smoking gun!   This might help explain how processed grains have become such irritants to our dogs (and to us!) over the course of time since humans started mass-processing their food.   Unfortunately, it may be that once a dog’s body is sensitized to irritating peptide fragments from grain, that even unprocessed grains may provoke a similar response.  (It will take some research to determine whether this is truly the case, but each case is as unique as the dog!)

And that is how grains got a bad reputation in dog food.

So, if your dogs hasn’t been diagnosed with a particular senstivity (or even an allergy) to grains, fear not!  Go out and discover good foods with good grains.  (We’re talking Oats & Barley here.)

I’d like your indulgence to begin this entry with an opener that may seem out of place at first.  I’d like to talk a bit about High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). 

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.

But first, a bit about HFCS.  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 humans. 

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, the new generation have been “tested” 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.

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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I frequently get questions about raw diets, and I’ve often had my open-mindedness challenged by good questions and valid observations from veterinarians (trusted, thoughtful veterinarians, often holistic) that give me cause to constantly apply new information and reasoning to the premise behind raw (especially raw meat) diets.

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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This seems like a great first question for our discussion area about dogs and their foods.

You may have read the following in our online FAQs to answer the question we get frequently: “Isn’t meat a dog’s natural food?”

Yes and no. The argument that dogs should eat only meat is based upon the idea that primordial dogs, as hunters, preyed upon game and fish, and consumed virtually no vegetation. Proponents of including fresh vegetables and grains often suggest that these foods are beneficial and point to examples of skin changes, coat degradation, and other adverse symptoms when carbohydrates from grains or vegetables are not fed to several breeds. Eventually, the question of meat vs. meats & vegetation may be answered by more complete physiological and biochemical research of various breeds, but today it is considered an open question. In the wild, Dr. James C. Halfpenny, Ph.D, the noted naturalist and documenter of canids (foxes, jackals, wolves, coyotes) in Yellowstone National Park, documents — with some detail not for the squeamish — that droppings reveal that wild canids do, indeed, eat vegetation, and that ingestion varies seasonally, based on available food supplies.

But, modern dogs are NOT wolves, just as humans are not chimpanzees. Domesticated (and, especially purebred) dogs’ dietary needs are varied and differ by breed.

freshfetch incorporates this knowledge when we create our recipes, and we add a little common sense that relates to, especially, purebred dogs. Working from the understanding that we can trace the ancestry of many breeds, we realize that many breeds are relatively recent additions to the canine family. We can research the foods that were very likely used during the development of the breed, based on the area of the globe in which the breed developed. Some records exist and many breeders already know what foods the breed’s ancestral lineage was fed, so we build on those foods, knowing that those foods allowed the ancestors of today’s dogs to flourish, procreate, and give us the gift of our dogs today.

What does your personal experience tell you about your dog’s diet?

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freshfetch Village is a community of dog lovers and dog owners sharing information and validating experiences that we can use to make freshfetch foods ever better for dogs.

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!

Welcome to freshfetch Village!

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.