Your Pet's Best Friend

Dog Food Advertising - Live longer with Purina

I started to call this post "Part of this complete breakfast".  Google that phrase and you'll find a lot of take-offs on that time-honored advertising slogan.  I remember it as the tag on commercials for my favorite sugar-laden cereals.  A bowl of sugar-saturated cardboard chips would be featured in a photo that also included bacon, eggs, toast, milk and orange juice, and the announcer reminded us that our sponsor's fine product is "...part of this complete breakfast."  Which part? Why, the unnecessary part, I believe.

Before sugar became demonized, it was considered a selling point when advertising to kids.  Honey Smacks used to be Sugar Smacks.  Golden Crisp was Sugar Crisp.  Frosted Flakes were Sugar Frosted Flakes.  Pops were Sugar Pops.  Remember old Sugar Pops Pete here?  "Oh, the pops are sweeter and the taste is new, they're shot with sugar, through and through."  My kids couldn't believe that one.   "I sweeten them up with my sugar-popper!"

In Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, there was an article noting that research seems to indicate that kids (just kids?) watching more food ads will eat more.  Interestingly, they don't seem to necessarily crave the advertised product -- they just eat more.  So if you fill the house with more raisins and almonds and carrot sticks, they'll eat more of that, just as they would eat more Twinkies and Root Beer if the house were full of that.

So what does any of this have to do with the post title above?  Today I saw an advertisement for Purina stating that "...research shows that a diet of Purina Puppy Chow and Purina Dog Chow, when properly fed, can add years to your dog's life."  The italics, as you might guess, are my own.  What does that mean, exactly?

In 2002, researchers at Nestle-Purina published the results of a study showing that dogs fed a calorie-restricted diet lived longer and healthier lives.  They took Labrador Retrievers and paired littermates.  One dog ate an "average" amount of food, and the other was fed 25% less.  In other words, the "average dog" gets 4 cups a day and "healthy dog" gets 3 cups.  The dogs getting 25% less to eat each day lived an average of two years longer, and the onset of age-related health problems was also delayed by years.  Similar data had been found in rodent studies and many folks think that the data is probably applicable to people, as well, though it's rather difficult to do the same kind of controlled study in humans.

The key here is that it wasn't feeding Purina products that added those healthy years -- it was staying lean and hungry all the time.  Of course, you could say that the dogs who ate 25% fewer Purina products lived 2 years longer.  That doesn't make such good advertising copy, though, does it?  Don't get me wrong:  I think Purina makes good pet foods and is a reputable company.  I don't think the ad is designed to get you to feed your dog less Purina Dog Chow, and that is what "...when properly fed" actually means in this context.

What's the old saying?  "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics."  Something like that, I think.   Reminds me of the old cold war joke where the Russians and the U.S.A. have a two-boat race.   New York Times reports, "Americans Beat Russians".  Pravda reports, "Russians finish second, Americans finish next-to-last". 

Part of this complete breakfast indeed.

Nutritional Wisdom

Nutritional wisdom is the concept that an animal somehow innately knows what nutrients its body needs, and also where to obtain them.  For example, if your body were low on potassium, you would instinctively know to eat a banana.  And you thought those banana cravings were just evidence in support of the "Man-from-monkeys" evolution theory.

This always comes up when a dog has eaten some bizarre or unpleasant substance, such as cat poop.  Today, I performed an ovario-hysterectomy on a young Golden Retriever.  When I checked her abdomen during the surgical prep, I thought I was feeling a urinary bladder full of stones.  It turned out to be her rectum, which was full of pea gravel. 

The dog's owner can be predicted 100 percent of the time to ask, "Do you think there's something missing in his diet?"   Well, let's look at the ingredients on your bag of Science Diet puppy food.  By golly, you're right: neither cat poop nor rocks are listed anywhere on the label.  This dog has a granite deficiency and has made her way unerringly to a pile of igneous rocks.  Or wait! Maybe it's a limestone deficiency and she has eaten sedimentary rocks. But wait! What if she can't tell the difference? What if she's deficient in sedimentary rock, and has eaten metamorphic rock instead?

Dogs just eat anything that can't get away from them.  When someone says that an omnivore will eat anything, they usually mean both plant material and meat.  A dog is an omnivore's omnivore.  He will literally eat anything.  If it can't get away, he's going to eat it.  If he only vomits it up twice, he'll probably eat it a third time.  It doesn't have to be tasty (from our point of view), much less nutritious.  It doesn't even have to be digestible.  It doesn't have to feel good (like the patient who ate the Brillo Pad... twice). I guarantee you that all today's patient derived from her meal of gravel was that good feeling you get when you swallow a handful of rocks (and that cool clinking noise it makes when you go poop, of course).

Despite our harrowing experience with the pet food recall of late, name-brand commercial pet-foods are going to be a lot better balance of nutritious ingredients than what most dogs would pick out for themselves foraging.   How well do I recall the dog-food ad "...with more of what your dog likes!"  I envisioned dumping out a bag of dried toads, cat poop, possum vomit, and dirty kleenex.  I bought Science Diet instead.

Home-Prepared Diets

In light of the recent spate of pet food recalls, many folks have considered preparing their pet's diet themselves from fresh ingredients.  Since any fresh produce that is out of season must be coming from South America or someplace, I'm not sure how that makes us feel that much safer.

There is nothing inherently wrong with eating table food: after all, that's what you are eating, right? We know that there are many pets who subsist on table food, eating only what they like the best.  Unfortunately, this seldom results in a balanced diet. Rather, it usually results in health problems over the long haul, particularly noticeable in bones, skin and teeth.  I suppose you could live on little colored marshmallows for a while, but you would begin to lose strength, endurance, and your beautiful complexion.

Good name-brand pet foods supply good, nutritious ingredients in the proper proportions.  When not contaminated with poisonous ingredients, this is the simplest way to provide your pet with a good diet.  Most pets eating Science Diet, or Iams, or Pedigree, or Purina, etc. have obesity as their most common medical problem related to nutrition.

If you are bound and determined to feed a home-prepared diet, here are a couple of resources recommended by Veterinary Information Network:  BalanceIt.com and PetDiets.com

If you are looking for someone to validate the fact that you feed your dog nothing but bologna (I know, I know, you remove the stringy wrapping first: good for you), I don't think you'll find that.

Weight Loss Drug for Dogs

Last night the Pfizer company broke the news about their amazing weight-loss drug for dogs.  They have put nothing out in the veterinary journals, no teasers from their representatives who call on us, no nothing.  Then it's suddenly on CNN.  Generally speaking, drug news that hits the fan in this manner has been less than good in my past experience.  Naturally it's blog fodder, and I'm far from the first (see this cute intro;  the guy's funny, I must admit).

I'll be the first to admit that we have lots of obese dogs and they certainly need help.  It's easy to make fun of "diet pills for dogs" (though Slentrol is a liquid).  Sure, the cheap answer is to feed the dog fewer calories and give it more exercise.  That would mean that we would have to have just a little more will-power than the dog does, though.  The dog has no money, he has no can-opener.  If he's too fat, we did it.  The least we can do now is give him drugs along with his treats.  Maybe they'll soon make Slentrol in a delicious chewy treat instead of yucky liquid.

As Americans, I'm not sure when we jettisoned the pioneer spirit and decided that the lazy way is the American way.  It sure happened sometime, though.  "Say NO to drugs" only applies to drugs from South America.  For everything else, it's "take a pill, take a pill, take a pill".  Not happy?  Not thin? Can't sleep? Take a pill.  We make Huxley's Brave New World look tame.  Heaven help us.

Slentrol can produce side effects of vomiting (most common), diarrhea, lethargy, and loss of appetite.  Sort of sounds like getting an eating disorder by prescription.  No wonder you lose weight.  What it's SUPPOSED to do is to interfere with fat metabolism.  While Pfizer admits that the mechanism of the weight loss (in the absence of the above side-effects) is uncertain, dogs do lose weight while they take it.  If they stop taking it, the effect is lost immediately.  Their research indicates that the obese dog could lose up to twenty percent of its excess body weight.

If you give it to other species (like people) you only get side-effects, no good effects, so taking the dog medicine is a no-no.

So, you can blow off diet and exercise, give two dollars worth of medicine every day, and reduce your dog's weight somewhat.  Depending on how big he is, he could still be obese even with that.

I can hardly wait for the testimonial pictures, complete with the little asterisk *.  I wonder if the newly skinny dogs will get breast implants, too, like the skinny ladies do.

* Results not typical.