A Dog's Dinner: What Should We Really Be Feeding Our Pets?

24:34Meat and meat byproducts make up just under half of the typical pet food recipe. The rest is mostly some form of grain. Probably rice and corn being the two biggest ones. But no matter what animal's meat is being used, which part of the animal, which grain the pet food includes, if it has an AFCO label for their standard pet food called Complete and Balanced. It is literally all the same nutritionally. Unless your vet tells you your pet has a particular health issue, your pet will get everything they need, even if they eat the exact same thing for every meal. AFCO issued its standards for the first time in 1969.

25:05It's updated them since to reflect updates in the nutritional science, but that means that since the 70s, pet food has been pretty standardized. So when I was growing up, you know, in the 80s, I remember basically all dogs ate was kibble. You know, you gave them dry kibble or maybe canned food, but there wasn't a lot of choice. Maybe not a lot of options, but there were some very memorable ads and jingles from that decade. Kibbles and bits, kibbles and bits. I'm going to get me some kibbles and bits, kibbles and bits. Kibbles and bits. I'm going to get me some kibbles and bits. Meow mix. Tastes so good, cats ask for it by name.

25:47But over the decades, your basic kibble started to seem kind of basic. Believe it or not, dogs get gray whiskers too. And as they get older, their needs change. So, you know, you now have kibble for large dogs and small dogs and for large dogs that are old. There are, I would argue, almost infinite number of variations based on, you know, activity level and age and breed. This is a Labrador Retriever. This is a golden retriever. They may seem similar, but when you take a closer look, the details tell a different story. These dogs eat, digest, and process energy differently. At Royal Canin, we obsess over these details.

26:30AFCO now recognizes different life stages and has minimum nutritional requirements for those. Like, say, a kitten or a puppy will need more protein in their feed as they're still growing. But the different diets for different breeds? I would venture to guess a lot of that is marketing. This is how you charge more for something that is otherwise essentially the same. James Spratt realized this 100 years ago. He started selling greyhound cakes and puppy cakes and patent cod liver oil old dog cakes, in addition to his regular patent fibrin cakes. This approach is super profitable. Pet food already has a high profit margin.

27:04It's about the same as human junk food, which you've heard is pretty cheap to make and so makes companies quite good money. And the science-y versions of pet food have even higher profit margins. But more recently, there's been kind of a backlash against big pet food. These days, the cool pets are all being fed ancestrally appropriate raw foods and carnivore diets and fresh, never frozen gourmet meals. So are these premium options the best way to feed our pets? That's coming up after the break. Plan B is a backup birth control option that's there for you when things don't go according to plan.

27:40It specifically works after unprotected sex and before pregnancy occurs by temporarily delaying ovulation. Plan B is available nationwide at all major retailers and through delivery apps like DoorDash. No ID, prescription, or age requirement. It's the number one OBGYN-recommended brand of emergency contraception, and it won't impact your future fertility. That's Freedom to Be. Use as directed. Who cares about your poops? Ollie does. That's why Oli's science-backed gut health lineup helps support your family's regularity. From daily probiotics to fiber gummies your kiddos will love. Find it all on Oli.com.

28:20That's O-L-L-Y.com. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Spring just slid into your DMs. Grab that boho look for that rooftop dinner. Those sandals that can keep up with you? And hang some string lights to give your patio a glow up. Spring's calling. Ross, work your magic.

28:49Over the past few decades, there have been a number of human food trends that we've talked about on the show before. There's the paleo diet and the carnivore diet and the ancestral diet. These started a few decades ago and became increasingly popular over the years. And surprise, surprise, these trends have shown up in pet food, too. The father of Paleo for Dogs is an Australian vet by the name of Ian Billinghurst, and he called his diet the biologically appropriate raw food diet, or BARF for short. Here he is explaining the BARF diet in a recent interview. This is the simple understanding you need to have of why you're food raw, because it's what dogs and cats are designed by evolution to eat.

29:31It's the gold standard. So what I discovered over time was the further you vary the diet away from what evolution designed for our dogs and cats, the greater the problems you get. So that was barf. The idea is that dogs are descended from wolves, and so they should be eating what wolves eat. Companies now sell foods that are raw or super heavy on the meat. So we've created a food that satisfies a dog's wolf spirit, grain-free blue wilderness. It contains more of the meat dog's desire. I've done a ton of my own research and hooked up with some of the most well-known dog experts in the world to compile this information.

30:07Celebrated expert, sorry, actor Rob Lowe is one of many celebrities who feel strongly about the importance of raw food, grain-free pet food. And that's when I hooked up with Dr. Gary Richter, the guy voted America's favorite vet. I asked him my number one question. If you want to avoid kibble, what should your dog eat so they can stay healthy, energetic, and full of life? His answer? Raw food. But not just meat. Raw food includes dog-healthy, nutrient-dense foods, including organ meats, certain fruits, veggies, and herbs. These are the foods your dog evolved to eat in the wild. These trends started to emerge in the 1990s, but they really picked up steam after a massive pet food recall in 2007.

30:52The Food and Drug Administration has blocked imports of wheat gluten from a company in China because they were contaminated. Tainted food is suspected to have caused kidney failure in dogs and cats across North America. The wheat gluten was contaminated with melamine and cyanuric acid, which made it seem higher in protein, but was also unfortunately toxic. So they recalled like 200 brands of cat and dog food, which was just huge, really sweeping. And the FDA estimates kind of vary, but thousands of cats and dogs died from that because they ate the products before they were recalled. This gave a boost to alternative pet foods, like that Rob Lowe raw food diet.

31:34But it turns out that Rob Lowe and Gary Richter and Ian Billinghurst, Dr. Barf, they're wrong. First of all, as we've already discussed, dogs are not wolves. They haven't been wolves for millennia. And like us, they are evolutionarily adapted to an omnivorous diet, not a carnivore diet. Because they are adapted to eating grains, it's not surprising that scientists have found that feeding your dog a diet that doesn't include grains, especially whole grains, is associated with health risks, including heart problems. Cats are carnivores. What that means is they do need particular amino acids that are not found in plants.

32:11They only come from meat. It doesn't mean that they can't digest grains. They can. They can extract a lot of important nutrients from grains. And there's even some evidence that consuming a grain-based fiber helps them regulate their glucose levels, which is why researchers have concluded that a moderate amount of grains is a good thing in cat food. But most importantly, grains or no grains, neither cats nor dogs should be eating raw food. There is no good scientific evidence for any benefit to dogs and cats from eating raw food, and there's plenty of evidence of harm. Most foods for pets are normally heat-treated, cooked, pasteurized.

32:47Raw foods are not processed that way. So that means that if there are pathogens in there, salmonella, E. coli, things like that, that might be destroyed by heat treatment, they are not destroyed. This is a problem that surfaced recently in terms of the bird flu epidemic. Bird flu is infecting a lot of the commercial poultry in this country, and some of that poultry gets used in pet food. A warning is going out about raw pet food now that new cases of bird flu are being reported in two New York City cats and one of the pets, a little kitten, died from the infection. The city is investigating the outbreak and warning pet owners to avoid using raw foods and milk.

33:28A vet says the sick kitten was fed savage cat food. The kitten had to be euthanized. So raw food is not the answer. But like we say, especially since that big recall, people have been looking for alternatives to big industrial pet food. And they're willing to spend money on it. I mean, we do see dogs as family members, so we want to feed them the best and make sure we're feeding them something that we trust is healthy for them. This view of pets as family members isn't the way it's always been. it's relatively new. As we said, we first saw both cats and dogs as kind of things that were useful to have around.

34:03And then over time, they moved into our homes and now their family, even more so today than just a few decades ago. They've sort of become more humanized, more and more of us, and I include myself in this, sort of treat our pets not that differently than children or than any other human member of the family. With millennials and Gen Z, those generations have fewer kids. You know, dogs do become, fill that kind of role of the child, I guess, so to speak. And so, yeah, I think people are willing to kind of go above and beyond to feed their dogs certain things that even 50 years ago would have been kind of unfathomable.

34:41When Rachel says unfathomable, she's not wrong. This is a clip from a recent docuseries about Neighbors on HBO, this is a real live person describing what she feeds her dog. With Cooper in my life, you know, I feel like I have a child in the house all the time. So Cooper's meal consists of sushi-grade salmon, chia seeds, organic broccoli, goat liver, beet crow, chicken heart, chicken foot, sardine head, flaxseed oil, and bee pollen. He's on a raw diet. And the first thing he goes for is his chicken foot. This woman is not the only person who makes her pet food at home, even if most people don't include bee pollen and goat liver.

35:24But for people who want those premium steak dinners or that sushi-grade salmon for their pet without the work, there are lots of companies who will make that for you. It's Texas-style barbecue beef or Spanish paella as, you know, the farmer's fresh food. Many of the pets eat better than I do. At Fresh Pet, we believe that feeding fresh food is the best way to keep our pets healthy and happy. That's why we make our food with only fresh, wholesome meats and veggies. Now we're introducing Fresh Pet Custom Meals. Fresh food that's perfect for your dog. Delivered right to your door. Always fresh, never frozen.

35:58Saying fresh, never frozen is the quickest way to drive me completely bananas. It is totally meaningless, as you'll know from reading my refrigeration book. But anyway, I'm sure all these gourmet meals are delicious. I mean, I love Spanish paella. But are these special options better for your pet? We've already established that raw food diets are not a good idea, but what about these seemingly home-cooked versions? One interesting data point about today's premium foods is that they result in less poop. Less than a quarter of the poop you'd get if you fed your dog 1980s-style generic kibble. And the poop you do get is apparently firmer and easier to clean up.

36:37That's great for people taking their dog on a walk, or for owners who have to be at the office for a lot of the day, but it's actually not so great for dogs. As we said, they're omnivores. They're meant to eat a lot of different foods, not just mostly meat. Historically, over the past however many thousand years, their diet had a lot of fiber in it, and so they apparently used to poop more in line with a generic kibble diet poop. It's a better option in terms of colon health. Apart from that end of things, it's actually really difficult to tell if pets are healthier when they eat premium pet food, or even if they're healthier eating commercial pet food versus table scraps.

37:11We've talked on Gastropod before about how hard it is to measure how changes in human food affect health over time. But for pets, it's even harder because there's no baseline data and very few independent studies. There's some evidence that pets are living longer these days than they had in the past, but that's nearly impossible to pin to their diets. They also go to the vet regularly and get shots and eat food that's heated and pasteurized so it's safer and aren't exposed to all sorts of harms that they would have run into just nosing around outside. What we do know is that, like us, our pets are now obese.

37:45Obesity in pets is an enormous and growing problem. The latest statistics I've seen suggest that more than 60 % of American pets are overweight or obese. It can increase the risk of diabetes and other illnesses. In older pets, my dog's aging now and probably could lose a few pounds. You know, it can increase the risk of arthritis or make the heart have to work harder. So it's widespread, but there's still a lot sort of we don't know about all the health consequences. One more than slightly overweight dog is a star in the delightful TV show All Creatures Great and Small. I don't know why this keeps happening.

38:24I only feed him the very best food. Ah, well, that could be part of the problem. What exactly is it you're feeding him? Oh, the usual. Chicken, beef wellington, plum duff. And he absolutely adores Trifle. Who doesn't? Good boy. and cake, of course. Of course, life without cake is hardly life at all. How could you deprive a dog of cake? Food is very much how a lot of us connect with our pets. You know, they can't speak. They can't express themselves in the same way that humans do. But we know that most of them like food. You know, when you're trying to bond with a new dog or cat, it's often by giving them treats.

39:06It's how we sort of show our love to them. We do this for our fellow humans, too, obviously. It's a large part of why I love to have friends over for dinner. But I think it's especially pronounced for animals because a lot of the other tools we have to sort of connect with and bond with other people aren't available to animals. So we show our love to and bond with our pets often through food. But as in the case of Tricky Woo, the pampered Pekingese of all creatures great and small, this kind of treat-based love language can backfire. Tricky Woo is becoming dangerously overweight. He's struggling to breathe.

39:42But he's been so listless, Mr. Herriot. I thought he must be suffering from malnutrition. So I've been giving him a little extra between meals just to build him up. Did I ask? A little calf's foot jelly, cod liver oil, beef wellington, and a bowl of Horlicks at night just to help him sleep. Mrs. Pumphrey, Tricky Woo's owner, she is absolutely certain that Tricky Woo couldn't possibly enjoy life without his beef wellington. And a classic British sugary malted milk drink for sweet dreams. But Michael says that our pets don't come into existence craving the finest pate. So yes, every dog, it seems like every dog loves bacon or would love a little bit of your steak.

40:29And that is probably true on some level. But when I talked to veterinarians, they actually said most of the preferences that our pets have are preferences that we create. And we create them because we basically give them things over time. And they learn to like those things. So Tricky Woo could survive and maybe even thrive on kibble. But apart from the microbial dangers of raw food and the health implications associated with overindulgence, and of course the damage to your bank balance from the cost of feeding your pet a premium diet, But is there any real harm from your dog or cat dining on the finest foods in the land?

41:06Assuming you do it safely and in moderation and can afford it. Well, there's certainly an environmental impact. If you listen to Gastropod, you likely know that the industrial meat complex has some environmental issues. Obviously, you know, the meat industry is a huge source of emissions, and it is about 20 % or so estimated about the animals that are slaughtered in the United States do come from sort of the pet food for the pet food industry. It's not just cast offs and extras. The number varies, but we're talking in the order of 2 billion animals each year. You might think that because pet food is largely made of parts of the animal we don't typically eat these days, that in reality, its impact isn't too bad.

41:49That's certainly the argument that gets made, that the pet industry is a way to reduce waste. That's what I assumed as well. But actually, it's not that simple. So two things are happening. One is a lot of these are prime cuts, like some of the fresh meat, the high end premium are just cuts that you would normally human grade food. And then when I looked into the industry at large, when you look at the economics of the livestock industry and sort of like what it takes to raise them and what makes it economical, the pet food industry was just a big source of demand and it wasn't just things that would have thrown in the trash.

42:20In other words, if there were zero pets at all, the meat industry would still have no trouble selling all its byproducts to go into fertilizer and glue, lubricants, soaps, drywall, baseball mitts, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, you name it. The pet food industry isn't using waste because if the pet food industry didn't exist, the byproducts wouldn't be waste. There's a big market for them. And so because the pet industry does exist, and those industries still also need animal byproducts to make their products, that means that even more animals need to be raised to feed all the pets. Yeah, this was eye-opening for me as well.

42:59This is not just things that would have been wasted. It is just part of the food system. You all know that the environmental impact of meat isn't just a climate change issue. It's also water and polluted runoff and land use, the land used to raise all that meat. It's something on the order of the area size of Mexico. So that is quite a large area just for using livestock for the world's pets. And premium brands have around triple the impacts of normal kibble because they have so much more meat. So if you live in a city, you don't have a car, you don't fly very much, but you have one or two huge dogs who are eating high-end, human-grade dog food every day, that could be a substantial part of your carbon footprint.

43:40So it's not the main culprit by any means, but it certainly contributes. So what is a climate-conscious pet lover to do? Well, there are new, more environmentally friendly protein options like insects. You are seeing companies making insect-based snacks for humans and things like that. For a variety of reasons, they've been sort of a hard sell. And so some companies are now exploring the pet food market. We've made an entire episode about eating insects, too. And Emily is right. many humans in the developed world have been slow to add them into the mix. But they are typically a much more sustainable source of protein than basically any livestock or fish in basically every way you can imagine.

44:22So if pets are cool with insect protein, that sounds like a real win. I conducted my own in-house taste test. I have two cats and a dog. The two food-motivated pets were happy to eat anything I put in front of them, Which I think is another reason some of these companies have their eye on the pet market. You know, pets usually aren't picky. I have a third pet, a cat who's picky and wasn't quite as sure about the insect food. But certainly my experience, my dog and one of my cats were happy to eat insect treats and insect kibble. I've heard anecdotally about lots of other pets that are too. Miska, my husky, loves the Jiminy Cricket treats.

45:02She prefers those over the other ones at this point. That sounds great. But as we discussed on our insect episode, insect growing companies are still having a hard time scaling up and making money. So it's not clear that they'll be able to meet the needs of the broader pet food market in the near future, even though it's certainly a good option. So what about just cutting out animal protein altogether? I mean, going vegetarian has huge environmental benefits when humans do it. Not to mention avoiding the animal cruelty that is such a huge part of industrial meat. Could our pets go veg, too? Turns out that, yes, you can buy entirely vegetarian pet food today.

45:37So, you know, it's emerged over the last few decades and hasn't really taken off until very recently. It's not always been feasible to do. We first had to understand what all the nutrients were and then understand how to synthesize them and then do food trials and basically see if it was effective. Feeding pets a plant-based diet does intuitively sound wrong, but we've already established that dogs are not wolves. And so they, like humans, can be perfectly healthy on a vegetarian diet. That said, cats do need amino acids that you don't find in plants. Without that, they have heart problems and things like that.

46:12The difference today, though, is that you can actually get a lot of those nutrients from non-animal sources. The veterinarians I talked to were much more blasé about dogs than by cats, but there have been studies that show that cats have thrived on these diets as well, as long as they're carefully formulated. Studies on dogs also show that they're totally fine and healthy eating vegetarian food. And in studies, they're actually finding that not only are most pets fine with it, but they're actually healthier and living longer. These studies are still pretty early, and they're showing maybe a year, a year and a half of extra life, which is not insignificant for dogs.

46:47But like all these nutrition studies, there are a lot of variables at play. And also some studies don't show any increased life expectancy. But they're also not showing harms. And in fact, there's even been a big benefit, at least for pets that have allergies. I had no idea this was an issue, but Michael says almost all of pet allergies are to meat proteins. And so switching pets to a vegetarian diet avoids all those triggers. And in fact, it's the health aspect that's a bigger sell for pet owners. That's what the insect pet food companies told Emily. They told me they learned pretty quickly that the sustainability argument was not enough to win over pet owners, or at least in most cases.

47:24And that what pet owners care about most, which is maybe should not be surprising to anyone, is their pet's health. And so more sustainable pet food is great, but is it going to be good for my pet and can I afford it? The owners do buy the food, so what they think probably matters the most. But we were curious, what do the pets themselves think of vegetarian food? The one I have tried is Veggie Supreme. So it's Wild Earth. And it's basically a mixture of barley and oats and dried yeast and sour gum and potato protein and millet, canola oil, spinach, vitamins and minerals. When Michael says, I have tried it, he hasn't tasted it himself.

48:01He's talking about his husky misca. We transitioned to that over about a week or two. And she's kind of never looked back. I mean, she obviously would love to eat everything on the table, and she often does. But in terms of her daily kibble, she asked for it, and she's excited about it. And we really haven't had a problem. The potential benefits of switching pets to vegetarian diets are huge. People who have done the math say that if all dogs switch to a vegetarian diet, it would reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 6%, which is more than if all of us never flew on an airplane again. So basically, when you look at how much emissions is emitted per pound of pet food for plant-based, it's going to be about 10 times less than it is for meat-based ones.

48:44And even more if it's beef. Michael recently wrote a column for the Washington Post about this topic, about the climate benefits of vegetarian pet food and his experiments with it. We were wondering, what was in the comment section? I would say people have very strong opinions. Some were very, very supportive and have done this for a long time and say it's great. I think the biggest feedback I got in support of it was that it helped their pets with their dietary and health issues. People are shocked at how many of these issues are related to diet and it clears them up because you just don't have a lot of these allergens and other issues and tends to be a little lower calorie.

49:21But not everyone was on board. A lot of people were very negative because they felt that either dogs were carnivores, which they are not, or cats are carnivores, which they are. And they could not possibly survive on something without that. Despite this widespread belief, Michael says that if the pet food has the AFCO stamp of approval, then it has the nutrients your pet needs, even if it's insect-based or plant-based. So even if that fresh, human-grade turkey dinner seems more delicious to you, maybe it's not what's best for your pet or the planet. You know, we love our pets, we love our family, and so we want to give them the best.

49:52And I think we maybe project a lot about what the best is. And what's best for your cat or dog is just not the same as what's best for you. So, yeah, I think we need to take a little bit of a step back and just think about, you know, what do they really want? What do they really need? And maybe less about what I need or want.

50:14Before we get to our thank yous this episode, we just want to ask again, if you can support the show at any level, we would be eternally grateful. We've got lots of fun rewards, including at the special supporters level, a bonus newsletter for each episode. The newsletter for this episode is all about GLP-1s for pets. Emily told us that a lot of pets in the U.S. are obese these days, and she wrote in the New York Times about treating obese pets with these new drugs. In the newsletter, is this a good idea? And what are the ethics of giving pets these drugs? Sign up and find out. Thank you so much to all of you who help us make this show.

50:50We could not do it without you. And thanks this episode to Rachel Kelly, Emily Anthez, and Michael Corrin. We have links to their work on our website, gastropod.com. Thanks also to our fantastic producer, Claudia Geib, and her dog, Una, who so patiently waited for Claudia to mic her before she chowed down on her kibble and vegetable stems. We'll be back soon with a brand new episode. Till then.