Premium Edge is voluntarily recalling two different formulas of its dry food for cats: Finicky Adult and Hairball. More details in the press release on their website.

The reason for this recall? Apparently, the cats affected suffered from thiamine deficiency. Pet food recalls are typically driven [...]]]>

Premium Edge Finicky Adult is one of the recalled lines

Premium Edge is voluntarily recalling two different formulas of its dry food for cats: Finicky Adult and Hairball. More details in the press release on their website.

The reason for this recall? Apparently, the cats affected suffered from thiamine deficiency. Pet food recalls are typically driven by contamination with toxins, not nutrient deficiencies, though earlier this year, Nutro had to recall several batches of cat food for sky-high levels of zinc.

Premium Edge’s parent company, Diamond Food, has had problems in the past with aflatoxin contamination in their dog foods; Diamond was also involved in the massive 2007 pet food recall. This review of Premium Edge food has a heart-breaking comment by a person whose cat died eating one of the recalled foods.

This is yet another demonstration that commercial pet food isn’t necessarily safe, much less complete and balanced nutrition for your cat.

For those of you feeling wary about Diamond Pet Food, you can view a fairly comprehensive list of brands they manufacture on their Wikipedia page. Some of them are big-name “natural” brands, like Natural Balance and Canidae.

1. I feel doubtful about the efficacy of herbal detoxification in general, partly stemming from a skepticism about the quality control [...]]]> One of the first things the vet gave me to give to Eric was Renafood, a supplement consisting of various detoxifiers, including beet juice. I’m skeptical that it actually does anything for two main reasons:

1. I feel doubtful about the efficacy of herbal detoxification in general, partly stemming from a skepticism about the quality control and potency of the herbs in any given supplement, and partly stemming from skepticism that herbal detoxification actually works in the way described. I mean, look: my cat’s kidneys are fucked. Thoroughly, utterly fucked. I’m not sure how or why minute amounts of carrot and beet might help him filter waste material more effectively, unless they’re somehow rebuilding his nephrons for him.

2. The logic of some of the claims presented in the Renafood information sheet. So, Renafood contains bovine kidney extract. That extract apparently holds “tissue cell determinants” that will instruct the kidneys to Shape Up, Son. I have no idea what a “tissue cell determinant” is, though I have a very vague memory of learning about cell fate determination—thanks, high school biology! But the information sheet doesn’t give any sort of helpful definition of what these tissue cell determinants do other than talking about something that sort of vaguely sounds like cell fate determination. Quoting from the information sheet:

The bovine kidney PMG extract found in Renafood contains cellular determinants that regulate cell activities. Genetic coding determines the proteins unique to cells in each tissue, gland and organ. Cellular proteins are the foundation of the cell’s nutrition. Similarly, bovine kidney contributes innumerable materials produced in the organ itself, such as acids, enzymes and hormone precursors—each captured and preserved to offer their innate benefits to the corresponding tissues in humans to promote optimal health.

Huh. That sure sounds like a fancy way of saying…nothing much. Prepare for a bulleted list!

• The first sentence makes an assertion that the cell determinants in Renafood regulate activities, and the next sentence is a more-or-less correct statement about cell fate determination, but doesn’t tell me how Renafood affects the genetic coding of cells.
• The sentence after that reads like a complete non-sequitur. Cellular proteins may or may not be the foundation of a cell’s nutrition (I don’t know enough about biochemistry to begin unraveling what this deceptively simple sentence means), but how does that relate to the thesis sentence or to the conclusion?
• Furthermore, what do they mean by “cellular proteins,” especially in this context?
• The first part of the last sentence is more-or-less true, because it’s essentially talking about the kidney extract providing proteins, fats and vitamins, but you can feed real food (like, oh, I don’t know, fresh kidney) and, if the Renafood claims are true, get the same effect.
• This information sheet from Standard Process explains what cell determinants do and how they relate to protomorphogens (which is apparently what constitutes the bovine kidney extract in Renafood), but it sounds even more gobbledegooky. The cell determinants in protomorphogens are apparently the mineral templates on which chromosomes are constructed. This is, near as I can determine (and I’ve confirmed this with biochemist friends just to make sure I didn’t miss something about cell biology) complete nonsense. Seriously.
• I’ve read the info sheet through three times, and I’m still not entirely sure how Renafood keeps cells healthy or helps regenerate cells, because I don’t see how the leap from digestive system to bloodstream to cell division is made—there’s a lot of talk about “affinity” and thermostability and how important cell determinant are, but very little actual science. The most credible-sounding scientific bits aren’t supported by any references, and most importantly, they’re not connected to how the supplement’s supposed to work. Speaking as a former technical writer, this is probably the shoddiest bit of technical writing I’ve ever seen.
• It doesn’t help that Royal Lee, the founder of Standard Process, has been prosecuted for criminal misbranding. The FDA has in the past characterized him as “probably the largest publisher of unreliable and false nutritional information in the world.” Given how lackadaisical the FDA has been and continues to be about food and drug regulation, these aren’t just fightin’ words, them’s strong fightin’ words.
• Taken as a whole, it sounds like Standard Prociess is claiming that eating Renafood will somehow stimulate kidney cells to work better through a mysterious process involving “cellular determinants.” If that’s not science-esque, I don’t know what is. (“Science-esque 2: This time, it’s not Science-esque 1!”)

In short: I’m not sure I buy into the idea that this does anything. I’m giving it to Eric right now because he loves it, and it doesn’t contain anything that seems overtly harmful. But my woo-woo meter is on alert, and if you want to save yourself $16, I’d argue that this supplement doesn’t do anything other than provide a nice source of vitamin A and a tasty snack.

(Note: I’ve written a companion piece on my worries about feeding commercial raw food, and why I’m taking the risk.)

Ladies and gentlemen, I submit that over the past forty to fifty years, we’ve been cowed and browbeaten by food advertising. Food companies [...]]]> Or not-cook, as the case may be for those of us feeding raw food.

(Note: I’ve written a companion piece on my worries about feeding commercial raw food, and why I’m taking the risk.)

Ladies and gentlemen, I submit that over the past forty to fifty years, we’ve been cowed and browbeaten by food advertising. Food companies tell us, over and over again, that cooking is difficult, messy and far too time-consuming for people with busy modern lives. They sell us microwaveable dinners, energy bars, cake mixes and canned spaghetti, all on the premise that they will be delicious, convenient, and (depending on the kind of instant food you get) healthy and nutritious.

Some foods claim to be meal replacements, like energy bars and Slim-Fast shakes, but not one of them has the chutzpah to claim that they should constitute your entire food intake. The foundation for a lot of the food advertising is that home-made is best, but cooking is arcane, difficult. Who has the time and skills to cook these days? And some of you need to eat our food or you’ll get fat (and then who will love you any more?). So use our products, of varying levels of crappiness, to suit your time and energy limits.

But home-made doesn’t have to be difficult or time-consuming. It’s perfectly possible to create a fresh, home-made meal in 25 or so minutes, and the only know-how you need is enough reading ability to follow recipe directions. Steaming vegetables doesn’t take all that long; neither does sauteeing chunks of meat, or drizzling raw salad greens with olive oil and vinegar. People, it’s OK. You have nothing to fear but fear itself—well, that, and accidentally burning your food, but this is where things like digital timers come in handy. What you make will almost assuredly taste better and be much more nutritious than what you can pour out of a box, a jar or a can. (Unless you burn your food. Seriously: timers are your friend. Also, instant-read thermometers.)

I don’t see how, in any way that matters, this is different from food for our pets. I’m not saying that everybody should make their own pet food, because bad home-made pet food is in many ways worse than bad commercial pet food. What I am saying that it’s a perfectly viable and relatively easy option, as long as you do your homework and approach it sensibly. Most people think otherwise, however, because the pet food industry has not only managed to sell us a convenience cobbled together from agricultural leavings, it has actually convinced us that feeding our cats anything else is going to be dangerous. Pet food companies have achieved what food advertising for humans hasn’t quite managed to do yet: they’ve made their food the gold standard against which everything else must be compared. It’s now conventional wisdom that commercial food should be fed as a sole ration to pets; anything else is unhealthy.

Pet food companies have managed to do this in a few ways:

They convinced us, and most importantly, the vets, that home-made food is nutritionally imbalanced. Dangerously so. If it weren’t for the expertise of pet nutrition scientists coming up with complete and balanced formulations that pass AAFCO feeding trials, we’d have cats suffering (and sometimes dropping dead) from malnutrition, such as diseases related to taurine deficiency, copper deficiency,¹ steatitis, and feline lower urinary tract disease, or… Wait. ALL of these things have happened to cats eating commercially-available, scientifically-formulated foods, many of which had passed AAFCO feeding trials. Right.

But the nutrient imbalances I’m talking about are in the past, you say. Pet nutrition has come a long way, baby. Look: no more copper or taurine deficiencies, steatitis is relatively uncommon, and we’ll all wave our hands and more-or-less ignore the fact that dry food seems to be implicated in idiopathic cystitis.

There’s no denying that cat food today has, indeed, corrected reported deficiencies, but there’s still a problem with trust. Pet food companies have been wrong about their foods being healthy and balanced for cats—and believe me, I’m talking about the relatively recent past, because up until 1992, propylene glycol was commonly used in cat treats (hey, it causes anemia in cats, but who knew?)—and I’m looking at this track record and going “No way am I going to believe them.”

And furthermore, they’re still wrong. About many, many things. Commercial foods still make cats sick—I’m not just talking acutely sick, like aflatoxin or melamine poisoning. I’m talking chronic diseases and malnutrition. Diabetes, food allergies and obesity are usually viewed as idiopathic or lifestyle diseases; they’re not seen as problems with commercial food per se. In fact, commercial prescription diets are the typical solution for cats with these problems. But commercial food—specifically carbohydrate-heavy dry food—plays a disproportionately large role in these conditions. The number of cats suffering from hyperparathyroidism or hypervitaminosis A from eating imbalanced home-made diets pale in comparison to the sheer number of obese and diabetic cats eating commercial dry food, or even the number of cats in the past who’ve suffered from taurine deficiency while eating commercial food.

But you wouldn’t know it, talking to most vets or reading nutrition textbooks. Cat food manufacturers and vets love to use gruesome stories of well-meaning but not-especially-bright owners feeding their cats nothing but beef liver, or pig brains, or texturized vegetable protein as evidence that all home-made diets are bad. But these home-made diets are bad because they’re unbalanced, not because they’re home-made.

By the same token, of course, commercial cat food isn’t necessarily bad simply because it’s made in a factory, but the realities of the industrial process and the corporate infrastructure means that the odds of them actually being good are very, very low. Here’s the biggest hurdle: Cat food companies may try to convince you that they have your cats’ best interests at heart, but most of them don’t. They have their bottom line and their shareholders’ interests at heart. They want to make the best cat food, sure, but it’s not the best cat food for your cat: it’s the best cat food that they can create from convenient, affordable feedstuffs that will meet known feline nutritional requirements while maximizing profits. (And I want to draw particular attention to the word “known,” because it’s the unknown nutritional requirements that have a nasty habit of biting us in the ass.) Any interest a pet food company may have in not killing Kitty lies in the desire to avoid PR disasters, not a deep-seated love for animals. It’s a testament to the effectiveness of public relations that these faceless, massive corporations are able to convince us that they have personalities and emotions.

Note: when I talk about “scientifically formulated” foods with disdain, I’m not trying to knock on the scientific process. I’m a big fan of the scientific process, and I’m glad of the transparency and experimentation that goes on in nutrition studies. Where the cat food manufacturers depart from science and fall straight into misrepresentation is when they represent a food not only as safe, but as healthy to feed as a sole ration. Unknowing misrepresentation (I’m not paranoid enough to believe that there’s any sort of malice underlying their screw-ups), but misrepresentation nonetheless.

Ultimately, commercial cat food isn’t governed by science, it’s governed by ideology, one that elevates “nutrients” over other qualities like freshness and ingredient quality. Michael Pollan calls this ideology nutritionism, and nutritionism isn’t just rampant when it comes to pet care, it’s outright normative. Read any veterinary textbook on cat or dog nutrition, and you’ll pretty quickly stumble across the statement that nutrients are what matter, not ingredients. But this iteration of nutritionism is, at its core, nonsensical, because the ingredients—the food itself—determine how easily the nutrients can be extracted and absorbed. Looking at nutrients in isolation strips them of their context and the fact that the ways in which they provide nourishment can be extremely complicated. The nutrients interact with each other. They react with the digestive system. They react to cooking, and freezing, and oxygen, and light, and free radicals, and a million other things. Nutritionism claims to be scientific, but it’s most emphatically not; it’s the values system of the industrial agricultural complex gussied up in a lab coat and protector goggles.

And I’m here to say that pet food companies going “Aw, shucks, we sure did make a mess this time, but we promise to do better next time, because look at all this neat stuff we’re finding out about nutrients!” just isn’t good enough. It’s time we called them on their shit. Yes, the fact that cat food manufacturers have modified their diets based on new data proves that industry, to a certain extent, is self-correcting, thanks to science and, y’know, the desire to avoid big, messy PR debacles. But the self-correction comes after the sicknesses and the deaths, and knowing that cats will be slightly less fucked up in the future because yours was an object lesson for Hill’s or Iams is cold, cold comfort. The incentive to not fuck up in the first place doesn’t even come close to outweighing the desire to maximize profit. The profit motive, combined with widespread public trust bought with millions of advertising dollars, and sheer hubristic ignorance—the kind of ignorance that results from not knowing what it doesn’t know, and is over-confident in what it thinks it knows—results in corner-cutting that occasionally has disastrous results. But the big companies can weather these disasters with relative equanimity, because of lax regulation and because they’ve managed to convince people that commercial pet foods are the only healthy options available. If you need an illustration of what I mean, take a look at the list of brands implicated in the massive 2007 pet food recall. Lots of big names, including so-called premium brands like Evolve, Eukanuba, Science Diet, Nutro and Natural Balance. How many have gone out of business? Of the big names: none. People are still buying these brands in droves, and I’m willing to bet that it’s because they think they have no meaningful choices for a healthy diet outside of commercial food.

It all boils down to this: how do we want to deal with risk and uncertainty? I’m not some kind of radical. I am, in fact, conservative when it comes to feline nutrition. Here are the two assumptions that underpin my skepticism of commercial food and my belief that home-made is ultimately best, if you have the time and energy to invest:

1. I don’t assume that any pet food company has my cats’ interests at heart. Only the people who know my cats and are directly responsible for their care have their interests at heart. Everybody else mostly wants to make a living, and making cat food just happens to be the way they’re doing it. Even the companies that have done a damn fine job of convincing us that they’re small, mom-and-pop outfits that really, really care about your pets are owned by massive private equity firms—Wellness and Eagle Pack are owned by the Berwind Corporation, for example, and Nature’s Variety is owned by Catterton Partners. And because all these companies are interested in making things more efficient, almost all of them outsource their food production; if you think brands like Wellness, Nature’s Variety and Newman’s Own don’t use Menu Foods, well, you have another think coming.

And sometimes, these manufacturers get sloppy. Criminally sloppy. Killing-thousands-of-pets sloppy, such as when they get cheap wheat gluten from China adulterated with melamine (the adulteration was probably deliberate, because melamine makes the protein content appear higher). Sometimes, their sloppiness gets caught, but I’m not going to bank on that, nor on my magic ability to spot the sloppy ones.

2. I firmly believe that we have barely scratched the surface of nutrition science, and, like Pollan, I don’t believe that studying nutrients is necessarily the best way to understand food and how to eat. We’re talking about the multiple, simultaneous interactions of many, many nutrients, some of them complicated chemicals, with biological systems. The reductionist method is a great way to study things, but holy damn can it be incomplete, and this applies especially to anything food-related. Food is complicated, and animals are even more complicated, and pet food companies don’t do a good enough job acknowledging this complexity. What’s more, they have an overriding interest in hiding the fact that the science of nutrition isn’t nearly as certain as they’re making it out to be.

Here’s the thing: Nutrition science is great for studying malnutrition. It’s fantastic for figuring out why we’ve fucked up and how to correct it. But as things stand, it’s terrible at figuring out how to eat well, and not especially great at pointing out where we should go if we’re basically healthy, beyond determining mandatory minimum intakes. And part of this lies in the fact that studying malnutrition and nutritional therapy to address illness are both more likely to produce testable and falsifiable hypotheses. The other part lies in the fact that “how to eat well” is a slippery, value-laden question that’s not especially susceptible to scientific analysis. My decision to feed my cats fresh, whole food is based every bit as much on a secular version of a purity taboo as they are on a science-esque conviction that fresh, whole food offers superior nutritional value. Again, I say: beware of people who claim to be feeding their pets what they do solely because it’s the scientifically sound thing to do. Behind that talk about science is a value judgment that’s lurking just beyond the beakers and retorts, trying to look sciencey.

There’s a quote often (mis?)attributed to Magellan: “The Church says that the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow of the earth on the moon and I have more faith in the Shadow than in the Church.” I, myself, have seen the fact that my cats have a long evolutionary history of obligate carnivory, and I have more faith in a diet that mimics the composition of whole prey than in anything I can pour out of a can or a bag, especially given the uncertainty in the science and the pet food industry’s terrible track record.

So, you know what? Screw nutritionism. I’m going to feed my cats food.

¹ Morris JG, Rogers QR. Copper Oxide is an ineffective source of copper in queen diets. In: Proceedings, Pet Food Forum, Chicago IL, 1995: 107-108. A quick summary: A group of domestic short-haired cats had problems with reproduction, including failure to conceive, fetal resorption, cannibalism, small, weak kittens, and severe coat and skeletal abnormalities in newborn kittens. The queens were fed a dry food that had passed AAFCO trials for feline growth and maintenance, and were on the kibble for 8 months before the owners noticed problems. Note: AAFCO feeding trial periods for gestation runs from estrus to six weeks after the kittens are born. Kitten trials run only 10 weeks. Adult trials last 6 months (the longest). There was no way any AAFCO trial could’ve caught this. [↩]

One of the things I did to modify Eric’s diet after finding out about his polycystic kidneys was to reintroduce squash into his diet. In the past several years, I had dropped feeding vegetables to my cats entirely, largely because I was feeding them whole ground animals and [...]]]>

One of the squashes from our garden

One of the things I did to modify Eric’s diet after finding out about his polycystic kidneys was to reintroduce squash into his diet. In the past several years, I had dropped feeding vegetables to my cats entirely, largely because I was feeding them whole ground animals and canned Wellness and Evo on the side. I figured that the canned food was providing plenty of vegetable matter. Now that Eric’s sick, however, I’m much more draconian about feeding mostly raw food—partly because it’s better for him, and partly because Eric prefers it over the canned, which is strange because in the past his sole food preference, near as I could tell, was HOORAY FOOD OM NOM NOM NOM.

I added the squash back into Eric’s diet largely because I remembered reading back in the day that squash helps trap nitrogenous waste that would otherwise make it into the bloodstream. Today I went on an article hunt to see whether this had any sort of scientific basis, or if it was one of those raw feeding myths that get passed around because it sounds so damn good.

Assessing the Evidence

Therapeutic use of fiber in chronic kidney disease (or, if you’re old-school, chronic renal failure) is much more well-studied in humans than it is in cats. There seems to be some evidence that the consumption of soluble/fermentable fiber leads to increased excretion of nitrogen via poopin’ vs. peein’, thus lowering the amount of nitrogenous waste circulating in the blood and therefore eliminated by the kidneys. But what about cats?

I’ve found one decently reliable study that specifically looks at cats. It’s by researchers at Iams, so it’s not exactly woo-woo; research from the Iams lab is about as mainstream as it gets. The researchers found that feeding moderately fermentable fiber (mostly beet pulp and fructo-oligosaccharides) to cats decreased serum nitrogenous waste and increased fecal nitrogen excretion. The study proposed the following hypothesis as to why this would happen:

The beneficial bacteria in the cat’s lower intestine feed on the moderately fermentable fiber, creating short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) in the process. SCFAs not only do all sorts of nifty things, such as keep the intestine cells happy and healthy, they also increase blood flow. The increased blood flow to the intestine results in more urea being circulated to the intestines, and the bacteria, which also produce urease (an enzyme that denatures urea), convert the nitrogenous wastes to carbon dioxide and ammonia, which are then incorporated into the bacteria themselves and then pooped out by the cat, as opposed to circulating to the kidneys to be peed out.

This sounds really good and really plausible, and the results show pretty unequivocally that fermentable fiber helps reduce the urea load in the serum, which means less work for damaged kidneys, but keep these things in mind:

1. This study is really small, involving only sixteen cats.

2. They were fed the diets containing fermentable fiber for relatively short periods of time—two weeks total for with an active waste collection period of eight days.

3. The decreased waste could be due in part to the decrease in protein digestibility. The study noted that the protein digestibility decreased to 87-91% with the fermentable fiber blends.

4. As far as I could tell, they didn’t actually actually draw any blood and run blood panels; they looked at urine and feces only.

So the verdict right now is: it probably does help a little bit, but as with anything scientific, the people in the white coats need to study it more. Given that steamed squash doesn’t contain anything harmful to cats, and given the potential benefits vs. potential dangers (yes, there’s a decrease in protein digestibility from the fiber, but Eric’s getting so much high-quality protein in his food that I’m not worried about marginal decreases at this point), I decided to go ahead and give Eric a heaping tablespoonful of pureed squash per day, which comes to about 10-15% of his total food. I created a mix from a gem squash harvested straight from my garden and organic butternut from the store. He loves it. I don’t need to mix it in with the food; it’s a lurid orange dot amidst the raw rabbit and Nature’s Variety, and he often eats it first. I suppose we’ll find out whether it does anything when we test his blood again in January.

Fiber Content for Various Squash Species

If you’re curious about the fiber content of different species of squash, here’s the information I looked up on the USDA National Nutrient Database per 100 grams of raw squash (unless otherwise noted):

Butternut squash: 2.0 g  (86.41% water)
Acorn squash: 1.5 g (87.78% water)
Generic winter squash: 1.5 g (89.76% water)
Pumpkin: 0.5 g (91.6% water)
Canned pumpkin: 2.9 g (89.97% water)

Canned pumpkin has almost double the fiber content of raw butternut (on a dry matter basis) and six times more than raw pumpkin, which is interesting. It looks like you can get more bang for the buck by feeding canned pumpkin. Eric likes the fresh stuff much better, however, so I’m sticking with it for now.