I recently had the wonderful experience of a lengthy interview with Dr. Marion Nestle about the 2007 pet food recall and the book she wrote about it, "Pet Food Politics." We also discussed her past books on human nutrition, including "What People Eat," and her forthcoming book on pet food, "What Pets Eat."
Christie Keith: [T]he reality that we deal with... is that we’re being told that any deviation from feeding your pet nothing but a commercial product for every single day of their life is actually bad for their health.
Marion Nestle: Yeah, well that makes no sense at all. I mean that really makes no sense at all. And I see that as – what veterinarians told us is that yes, they see animals that have owners that don’t know how to do it right and are hurting their pets in the process. But doing it right is so breathtakingly simple, I couldn’t believe it – I just couldn’t believe it when I saw those recipes. And they’re generic. The recipes that Hills gives, they’re generic recipes; a half a pound of grains, a quarter of a pound of meat, you bury them within it, you throw in some vegetables, you throw in a couple of supplements that you can buy at a supermarket and you’ve taken care of it. It couldn’t be simpler; all you have to do is follow it. You need a scale.
Christie Keith: Don’t you know you need an industrial calibrated scale and a food laboratory in your garage and a degree in biochemistry? Don’t you know this, Marion?
Marion Nestle: None of the above because they don’t have to be that accurate. Because if you think about it for one second, you think about it, people don’t eat that way and somehow people manage to survive and heart disease rates are going down and life expectancy is going up.
Christie Keith: Well, commercial food isn’t that precise either because if you just look at the label, it’s given in ranges. And the calcium range, for example, is a huge range. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, I’m just saying they’re not holding the two to the same standard.
Marion Nestle: The basic principles of nutrition apply to pets. And those are balance, variety and moderation. I can’t even say it without laughing. But they apply – they absolutely apply. And I’m very influenced by Mal in this because he, as an animal scientist, as part of the early part of his career, did animal experimentation in which you put animals on diets that were going to cause a nutrient deficiency. And he talks about how hard it is to induce a nutrient deficiency in an animal. If the animal is getting enough calories, and if the person – if a person is getting enough calories and is eating a variety of food from different food groups, it’s really hard to induce a deficiency. And so what people resort to is talking bout marginal deficiencies and sub-clinical deficiencies. I don’t know what that means. If you can’t document it, does it exist? I don’t know.
The full thing -- and be warned, it's extremely long -- is over here on PetConnection.
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