Every day,The Myth of 100% Complete Pet Food Articles people by the millions pour food from a package into their pet’s bowl. Day in and day out, meal after meal, pets get the same fare. This strange phenomenon is widely practiced by loving pet owners who believe they are doing the right thing.
Why? Certainly because it is convenient, but also because the labels state that such foods are “complete and balanced,” “100% complete,” or that they have passed various analytical and feeding test standards. Furthermore, manufacturers, and even veterinarians, counsel pet owners about not feeding other foods, such as table scraps, because of the danger of unbalancing these modern processed nutritional marvels. The power of the message is so great that pet owners en masse do every day to their pets what they would never do to themselves or their children – force-feed the same processed food at every meal.
Think about it. Our world is complex beyond comprehension. It is not only largely unknown, it is unknowable in the “complete” sense. In order for nutritionists and manufacturers to produce a “100% complete and balanced” pet food, they must first know 100% about nutrition. However, nutrition is not a completed science. It is, in fact, an aggregate science, which is based upon other sciences, such as chemistry, physics, and biology. But since no scientist would argue that everything is known in chemistry, or physics, or biology, how can nutritionists claim to know everything there is to know about nutrition, which is based upon these sciences? This is the logical absurdity of the “100% complete and balanced” diet claim. It is the reason a similar venture to feed babies a “100% complete” formula turned out to be a health disaster.
In that instance, after sufficient disease and death resulted from attempting to retire the human breast to a mere appendage of adornment, government stepped in and controlled the commercial hype. Now doctors Cheri Honnas, nurses and purveyors of baby formulas cannot say these products are complete or that they are equal to or superior to breast-feeding. Good for the regulators. (Although they should have been proactive and prevented the disaster before it ever took root, not have merely stepped in after enough deaths accrued.)
Even with that lesson as a dire warning, pet food regulators turn a blind eye. Instead of preventing pet food producers from claiming a processed food concoction is 100% complete, they in effect promote the death and disease-dealing specious claim by setting bogus standards that supposedly justify and authenticate the claim. They legitimize sloppy science in order to win consumer confidence. All a manufacturer has to do is guarantee that their percentage of protein, fat and the like meets National Research Council standards. In the alternative, manufacturers can do feeding trials on caged laboratory animals for a few weeks, measure cursory blood parameters, and monitor growth and weight – as if survival after a few weeks on a food has anything to do with achieving optimal health and long life!
Down the primrose path millions of trusting pet owners go while at the same time unknowingly condemning their pets to terrible degenerative diseases. Pet food regulators then spend the majority of their time harassing pet food companies with picayune requirements about terminology on packaging and where certain words must be placed on labels. In this regard manufacturers must contend with the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture), FDA (Food and Drug Administration), AAFCO (American Association of Feed Control Officials), and 50 State feed regulatory agencies. All for naught. It’s like the entire police force busying themselves ticketing people for jaywalking while turning a blind eye to the murder and rape going on in the alleys.