Complete Nutrition: Fresh Foods needed
Many nutrients, not just, are too fragile to survive the harsh manufacturing process and long storage times of dry foods. Dog food manufacturers know this, and most add back into the food recognized essential vitamins and minerals. But the synthetic versions of nutrients that are added are not as effective as natural nutrients, and many important nutrients are not included because they have not yet been discovered or sufficiently studied, are not yet considered to be essential, or are just too fragile.
Take a look at the last 15 ingredients listed on the bags of almost all dry dog food and you’ll see a list of chemicals–these are the vitamins and minerals. These synthesized nutrients have been shown to prevent short-term deficiency diseases; however, they do not provide optimum nutrition, and lack many of the cancer-fighting nutrients found in fresh, whole foods.
Fresh foods provide hundreds of different types of nutrients that are not in most long shelf-life foods, but were in the dog’s ancestral diet. Scientists are learning that some of the recently discovered nutrients, including taurine, carnitine, alpha lipoic acid, and coenzyme Q10, are important for overall body and brain health.
For example, the lack of taurine, a heat-sensitive, eye, brain, and heart nutrient, has a long, sad history in pet
foods. About 30 years ago, before canine and feline nutritionists understood the role of taurine, some cat foods were sold without sources of taurine. Cats, unlike most dogs, cannot make any of their own taurine, and must receive all of it in the diet. Thousands of cats went blind and then died before pet food nutritionists understood the cat’s need for taurine. But the story does not end there. Pet food nutritionists, based upon tests with beagles living in laboratory settings, assumed that dogs did not have a dietary need for taurine. Wrong, some breeds do. It took the early death of hundreds, perhaps thousands,
of dogs, including Newfoundlands and Portuguese Water Dogs who were eating taurine-deficient lamb and rice diets, before the dog’s need for taurine was better understood. If these dogs ate some fresh hearts just once a week, many
would have lived longer, healthier lives.
Taurine is now well studied and added to most lamb and rice dog foods, but hundreds of other heat-sensitive nutrients, all part of the ancestral diet, are not yet well studied and therefore may not be included in many commercial dry foods. The ABC Day detailed in See Spot Live Longer the ABC Way provides these nutrients.
