So I have a fair amount of grace for “woo” when it comes to human food. As there is no real scientific consensus on what food you should eat to be healthy (beyond Michael Pollan’s advice “don’t eat too much, and make sure most of what you eat are plants”). So if you are not trying rip people off or pass obviously unhealthy processed food off as a health food, I’m not going to argue with your obviously bullshit health food claim.
But that said I’m not sure that applies to dogs, they don’t live as long, and their diet can be completely controlled easily, and is not varied (in fact, as carnivores, it’s more healthy for them not to have a varied diet). So is there a widely accepted scientific consensus on what constitutes a healthy diet for dogs?
Well, dogs are omnivores (like us) and can thrive on a balanced combination of meats, grains, vegetables, and fruits. When feeding dogs, it’s helpful to include high-quality protein along with appropriate grains and vitamins to ensure they receive all the nutrients they need for optimum health. Cats are obligate carnivores, meaning they rely on a meat-based diet to meet their nutritional needs (particularly protein and essential amino acids like taurine).
That’s seems reasonable advice but also what’s the scientific evidence to back that up? What is “high quality” protein (and what is the evidence that supports the idea that dogs will live longer on “high quality” protein?)
As I understand it they are only omnivores in the sense of evolving to eat he stomach contents of the herbivores they kill or scavenge. So need a much less of a varied diet than true omnivores like us.
I don’t think that’s true. There may be debate on whether the data is correct or complete, whether the hypothesis is properly stated, or if the model correctly predicts outcomes. And there may be debate on how those scientific results should influence policy. Or some people simply might not understand the science.
But lets not confused properly peer-reviewed scientific results with politically motivated pseudoscientific marketing campaigns.
No, a surprisingly high number of studies simply don’t replicate when people have tried. It’s not unusual to get opposing results. It’s common to fail to publish trials that show no effect, or to go trawling through the data for some combination of variables that barely reaches statistical significance (p-hacking). A lot of science simply isn’t very good.
I was just looking at a study that claimed to show dogs fed a vegan diet were healthiest. They determined this by asking the owners to recall how many vet visits their dogs had. Totally reliable method, definitely not subject to any biases.
The media takes studies like these and reports them as gospel, and all most people see are the headlines.
It always depends on the quality of the science and indeed, the repetition.
Regarding climate science, there was, for a very long time, an insistence by deniers that research could not be replicated. In reality, the best capable critics, did manage to replicate it…
Did the right-wing sources of info did a Mea culpa and reported the confirmations?
Nope. They continue to influence the current contrarians that are in positions of power nowadays.
BTW, I did notice that the FDA was looking at the quality and risks for dogs regarding the food brands and types out there, some concerns and advice can be found here:
And while they are not as good as before, Consumer Reports gets a nod because they still do not depend on advertisements, so they are less biased as a result:
First, let me make it plain that I understand your point. Secondly, let me make it even more clear that I’d agree that nearly everyone involved in this topic is coming at it from a position of ignorance. And further, let me plainly admit that the points I raise, here, are theories and not proven science and that anyone paying credence to the following ideas are engaged in experimentation - with the risk that you’re doing something harmful to your little critters, rather than something good.
I would confidently say that, for humans, the nutrition panel that you see on the products that you buy is incomplete. If nothing else, the essential fatty acids are completely absent from the panel despite being essential. Likewise, the essential amino acids are missing. But, even past that, it seems very likely that even if those were added to the panel, we’d still be listing the essential elements of a diet and not the optimal. It seems likely (opinion) that there are more complex molecules like luteolin and quercetin that have positive effects if you’re deficient by not eating whole fruits and vegetables; plausible that there are simple elements like zinc and lithium that may help you to perform and live better, even if you can live out your whole life without any significant intake.
Ultra-processing food has a tendency to destroy basic nutrients like Vitamin C. This is why modern American foods are fortified. We discovered during the 20th century that the products that we were creating were deficient in basic nutrients and that fortification was necessary to bring them back up to snuff.
However, it is quite likely that because of the existence of complex, optional dietary molecules like luteolin and quercetin, we’re losing something by eating a diet comprised largely of highly processed foods. (This isn’t the only issue - the foods tend to also be low in fiber and devoid of omega-3s, which spoil quickly.)
Now that’s all stuff that’s true or probably true for humans. As humans, we eat more whole foods than we usually give to our pets. Dog and cat kibble are definitely ultra-processed foods. The human nutrition panel is incomplete. The animal nutritional panels are liable to be in an even more incomplete state.
If I am building a food that needs to pass the bar, and I’m a large company, I can do so at the barest, minimal level. I can pack raw vitamins into a corn starch & tallow ball, dry freeze it, and ship it out at exactly the amount that I need to hit, to gain the certifications that I need to gain customer dollars. And while this does guarantee that we’ve got everything inside the nutritional panel covered, that is all that we have guaranteed. (I’m not claiming, to be clear, that this is what these companies are doing. I’m just pointing out that this would be sufficient to clear the bar.)
If we look at the omega-3 content of human milk, for example, it’s at something like a 1:2 ratio with omega-6s (if I recall correctly) and current research would say that the optimal for adults humans is probably somewhere between 1:1 and 1:4. 1:2 would be a fairly good guess for the optimal (though that’s not proven - what babies need and what adults need could, genuinely, be different).
For dogs, mother’s milk is about 1:5 omega-3s to omega-6s. They probably need fewer omega-3s than us, but it’s probably not 0. AAFCO has no minimum of omega-3s for adult dogs and, even for puppies, only a lower limit of ALA with no comment on EPA nor DHA.
Humans are probably regularly deficient in EPA and DHA since we evolved with a diet of river eels and roe, which were subsequently depleted in the 19th century, and we shifted our diet towards land animals. If that’s a notable portion of what we were eating, then quite likely it was also a significant source of fats for our cats and dogs as well and it’s mildly suspect if it’s not mandated in their diet.
Cooking whole meals for your pets, from scratch, from whole foods is quite the commitment and I’ll admit that I haven’t been willing to go quite that far. But I’d vote that there is something to be said for trying to get more whole foods and higher quality ingredients, with less processing, into their diet. That diet must meet AAFCO standards, as a minimum. But if you can afford to surpass the minimum, and you can research well enough to avoid giving your pets things that are toxic to them, then you probably are doing good for your animal.
It is probably not surprising that the ability to do critical thinking is distributed in the population like other traits. Case in point - I know someone who believes in every CT there is - anti-vaxxer, flat earther, creationist, chem trails, lizard people. This was a critique group so I read her book. It was just as bad in terms of the plot making sense. Example - San Jose was nuked, but her characters went to a hotel nearby and checked in as if nothing was going on.
I’ve had the pleasure of watching many creationist videos, and a lot of it boils down to people who feel that if the slightest bit of the Bible was proven untrue, they would lost their entire moral support system. Flat earthers don’t push religion, but almost all believe in it due to what they think the Bible says.
And pretty much all of them don’t know what they don’t know. They have no idea of what it takes to be an expert in things, and think that their barely remembered high school science counts as much as a PhD in biology.
Eels are just a well-documented example of the shift from river animals to land animals. Anyone who has seen a modern river can attest that there’s nowhere that you go that you see something matching descriptions of the rivers of yore.
I could likewise have pointed to the history of beavers being designated as fish by the Pope. The importance of rivers to the diet of the average person was too important, for the Pope to risk messing with it, even if it meant calling a beaver a fish.
But most important is that we see clear benefits to mental acuity, eyesight, and longevity when people eat more fish. Anything we can say about history is speculative and just “story telling” up to the point that there’s real numbers to say that it was important.
Jews may not have been eating eel, specifically. They may have lost something for having made that choice (you don’t die by not consuming DHA and EPA, it’s just not optimal to lack it) - or they just ate different things that also had DHA and EPA.
Here’s the thing though; they DID have experts back then- the village wise woman or old geezers who knew stuff.
People did listen to them, and the modern equivalent is Dr. Fauci saying to wear a damn mask.
Except we’ve got this weird anti-intellectual streak that has convinced people that regardless of the subject, they’re adequately equipped to make an informed decision about it, even when it’s wildly outside of their education or expertise.
So we have people with high school educations disregarding the medical community and deciding not to vaccinate their children, because they think they know best, vaccines are scary, and some huckster tells them that crystals and essential oils will solve their problems.
Actually, they’ve evolved from wolves to have specific genes related to carbohydrate metabolism that wolves do not. In fact, it’s conjectured that their self-domestication was driven by the presence of human garbage/leftovers which weren’t primarily meat.
Yeah, and if too many bad things happened or someone died unexpectedly, sometimes they’d declare the village wise woman a witch and burn her at the stake.
A lot of people seem to have an all-or-nothing approach to experts, where if they discover the expert was wrong or misled them about one thing, they reject them totally and start trusting random conspiracy theorists on Youtube instead. I don’t understand this, it seems maladaptive.
They ate plenty of fish, though. Supposedly fried fish was introduced to England by Jews from Spain and Portugal and was then paired with chips to form our national dish.
Yeah, I agree with this. We only learn some nutrient is necessary when enough people eat a diet that’s deficient in it, and if it just results in sub-optimal health it can take a long time to establish. That’s why I give my daughter meat, although I’m a vegetarian myself. I think it’s safer to stick to something closer to humans’ natural diet, and not avoid entire food groups for a growing child.
When I talked about traditions earlier, I was thinking of conditions like pellagra, which Meso-Americans didn’t suffer from because they nixtamalized their maize and this made the niacin in it more bioavailable. They lacked the scientific knowledge to understand why it was necessary, but they did it anyway because of tradition. When Europeans starting eating corn, they did not adopt this practice, and thus were in danger of developing deficiencies whenever they relied on maize as their major food source.
Off-topic but it looks like in-land Jews, in Eastern Europe, probably would have gotten most of their marine fats from pike (esox lucius), e.g. as gefilte fish.
The Internet took all of those jobs and roles away though. Including local newspapers, all being killed off now. Local TV as well. So the people who would have been the local experts are out of a job.
Plus even back in the day they would have listened to THEIR local geezers and not necessarily the ones from three towns away, with a different set of memories and traditions.
Now we’re trying to replace all of that with a single set of answers, or so it seems. The feeling of the local community is blown away, and people seek it out on individual issues. The online community. Which very well may disagree with your online community. And unlike actual communities, which were forced to deal with outside events, these online communities are far easier to isolate and create positive feedback loops.
The problem you were trying to solve was not the problem your wife was trying to solve. You were trying to solve an engineering problem. She was trying to solve a social problem. Different skillsets are needed.
