What is the Best Food to Feed Your Pet?

What is the Best Food to Feed Your Pet?

The types of food your pet needs and can tolerate, will be determined by your pet’s inherited, endocrine immune imbalances.

Unfortunately, due to many years of inbreeding, the day of feeding any type of food to any pet has ended.

Today’s pets are endocrine immune different from the pets of yesteryear, and to believe you can put the same type of gas in a 1926 car as in a new Ferrari, is the same as believing you can feed any pet any food in today’s world.

As a veterinarian in 1966, I was concerned about dogs ingesting foods that caused allergies. I realized many years ago that food allergies and food sensitivities do not happen that frequently in felines. In 1968 I began to investigate food allergies in my clinical studies. I designed a home cooked meal for canines that included soy, rice, carrots and celery, with a small amount of a calcium supplement.

At that time, Dr. Mark Morris, Sr., who originally developed Hills Science Diets, referred to me as the “Holistic Veterinarian of California”. I asked Dr. Morris to review my non-meat diet. He suggested that I add some calcium to balance out the high potassium that the soy, carrots and celery contained. After trying this with several hundred canine patients with food allergies, I was able to determine that almost 30% of foods that were being fed to pets caused allergies in canines. I did publish these results.

I was immediately challenged by a board certified, veterinary dermatologist from England, who stated that food allergies in canines accounted for less than 1% of dermatological diseases. The 1% figure has been proven to be very wrong and this was the beginning of my campaign, to find a better source of canine nutrition that did not cause allergies.

People began creating my non-meat diet at home. One evening I received an irate call from a husband telling me he was standing in front of a five foot stack of carrots his wife was peeling and if I did not come up with a better way for his wife to feed their pets, I might be in physical difficulty! I listened!

Breeder’s Choice creators, Hal Taylor and his sons, helped me out with my formulation and created a frozen loaf, called Naturally Yours. This assistance was a real boon for me, as I did not have the experience to know what preservative would be safe to use. Pure, frozen water in the loaf was the answer.

Soon thereafter, I was approached by a client’s son who had a horse riding foundation for physically challenged children. Unfortunately, the mill that he ordered his horse food from sent him cattle feed with a growth hormone by mistake, which causes liver failure and death in horses.

The owner of the foundation found a type of living clay that neutralized the chemical toxin in the cattle feed and asked me if I would research it for him. I agreed to do so but my compensation would be for him to help me create a line of canine foods that would be healthy and at the same time, help avoid food allergies.

So one afternoon, with his help, I was able to create Nature’s Recipe. The first diet that was marketed, was the non-meat, vegetarian diet. Soon after that I was able to create the first commercial lamb and rice diet, including other healthy proteins.

After 10 years of this diet helping to avoid food allergies, the world of inbreeding was in full swing and many of these canines began to make anti-antibodies to the lamb and rice diet. Realizing this, I felt there was a need to find a healthy diet that would not lead to food allergies. This was the start of creating the Innovative Veterinary Diets.

Since many inbred canines began to make anti-antibodies against either the lamb or the rice, I created duck, venison, rabbit, fish, and white potato recipes. This definitely seemed to help the needs of those canines with food allergies. I also designed feline foods that were also designed with peas, potatoes and one protein.

These foods did help create a world of healthy foods that were required by our inbred pets, in order for them to be able to tolerate and avoid food sensitivities. The entire pet food industry seemed to try to emulate my recipes, which was important.

The pet food industry decided that improving the diets I created by adding ingredients that the pet owner would agree would be healthy for their pet and themselves would be important. Sweet potatoes, carrots, apples and soy products were added, which are high in phytoestrogen that can be damaging not only to the canines but also to their owners.

The world is beginning to realize the health problems that estrogen will cause, so why should people eat estrogenic foods, and why add estrogenic ingredients to pet foods?

Please remember, good nutrition is simple, and the longer the ingredient list, the worse the food.

If foods seem to be of concern for your pet, please only consider a limited antigen diet for the time being. What is a limited antigen diet? A limited antigen diet consists of one protein and one carbohydrate. Diets with multiple proteins may not agree with your pet. You are better using only one protein source and one carbohydrate.

The importance of grain free diets is not the fact that pets have gluten enteropathies (wheat allergies), but it is the fact that you must avoid, for both you and your pet, all GMO products.

It is obvious that a food allergy can cause vomiting and diarrhea but did you realize a secondary effect a food allergy can cause is inflamed ears, biting of the paws, and inflamed skin of the abdomen?

These are the locations of mast cells, and when the food allergen affects these cells, they degranulate and release their histamine that causes the inflammation.

If one ear, or one paw, or one area seems to produce more inflammation, this is an area that possesses more mast cells and therefore more inflammation.

The next time you take your pet in for a chronic ear infection, if the ear, or ears and the entire pinna (flap) of the ear is inflamed, this is not an infection but rather an inflammation probably caused by an allergy. Further clinical signs which will help you not call this chronic ear problems and infections might be with the fact that your canine is biting their feet and may have pink skin on their abdomen.

What about food snacks? Food snacks can also cause food allergies even though they seem to be considered healthy, but are they really?

So many food snacks contain dyes and colorings, and seasonings. Also, many of these snacks contain preservatives, since they are made out of such poor quality ingredients, that without a preservative they might become toxic.

Over the years, string cheese has served very well as a snack. It may be classified as a dairy product but it usually does not elicit the bad effects that are caused by milk and eggs.

Also, dry food has three times the calories of wet food! Please think about this when you eat a bowl of oatmeal and eat the same quantity of granola which is dehydrated. Generally, dehydrated kibble has three times the calorie of canned food. If for some reason canned pet food disagrees with your pet, please reduce the amount of kibble by adding some low fat cottage cheese and grated celery.

One last thought about the incorrect belief that dry food and biscuits reduce the formation of plaque. This works something like your dentist telling you that if you eat a hard English tea biscuit every day, you will not need to have your teeth cleaned.

I have also always thought puppy and kitten foods were also a sales pitch! Why would you feed your child more protein, fats and carbohydrates? This has never made sense to me!

These are only my thoughts and I hope they will help to make a difference.