For some 25 years, I have alerted the public to the risks of exclusively feeding heat-processed foods. Companion animal feeding has improved – digressed – from desk scraps and actual meals the own family ought to spare to nowadays’s “one hundred % entire” processed ingredients in broadly speaking kibble shape, with some canned and semi-wet additionally to be had. The meals appear clinical and improved. However, they’re far worse for the animals. Not the handiest nutrient value is diminished utilizing warmth, but a spectrum of pollutants is created. Additionally, the singular feeding of processed food has led to the spurious “one hundred% complete and balanced” claim that is both logically and scientifically fallacious.
Entrepreneurs have seized upon this information to create a spate of uncooked frozen (RF) ingredients to seize a marketplace niche and fill the demand from consumers looking for a raw alternative to conventional heat-processed canned semi-wet and dried puppy foods. As with maximum others, this marketplace trend can also begin with a few facts (uncooked food is the pleasant food) but gets distorted, if not perverted, as soon as economic opportunity enters the photo. This paper will have a look at the rationale of those merchandise, their economics, and risks. An extra shrewd and healthy alternative will be proposed.
Dangers
1. Weakened Pets And Highly Virulent Organisms – A uncooked nation and moisture in food provide the ideal surroundings for the increase of pathogenic organisms. Although prey foods within the wild regularly putrefy and are teeming with microorganisms, carnivores in the wild are immunologically tailored to these organisms or even benefit from the probiotic consequences of some. On the opposite hand, home pets ingesting sterilized heat-processed foods are immunologically compromised. They are threatened by mutated and especially virulent pathogenic strains created by using modern-day occasions and antibiotic resistance. Freezing at appropriate temperatures puts pathogens in a kingdom of arrest but does now not do away with them. Although all foods comprise some pathogens, unless they’re sterilized (requiring excessive heat or other measures that substantially lessen the nutritional value and create pollutants), it’s far the burden of those pathogens that ought to be off subject to clients. RF foods are an ability reservoir and vector of large numbers of pathogens.
2. Producers With Only Kitchen Technology – Because of the minimal technology required to produce an RF puppy food, essentially all people, regardless of credentials or information, can bring a product to the marketplace. All one wishes to do is grind and mix substances in a kitchen, package and installed a freezer. There are no controls over the situations in the kitchen, the satisfaction of the ingredients, or the approach of freezing. All these factors can dramatically impact the dietary value and pathogenic and toxic content of the food. But being in a frozen state hides these capacity dangers and poses a hazard to each pet and the people who handle the meals. John Doe can make food beneath unknown situations and with unknown elements, label, package deal, freeze and deliver to consumers or shops without one single control tracking or impeding the system. Regulators may, in the end, have a look at the label if they happen to peer it in a shop (they’ll in no way see it if shipped immediately to customers) and object to some terminology or the like; but, all John wishes to do is change the label, and all may be proper. The product could incorporate each manner of a factor, be laced with virulent pathogens, and receive the aegis of regulators … and into the market, it goes.
3. Raw Frozen Foods Are Not “100% Complete” – Many RF meals make (or suggest) the identical, spurious one hundred% entire claim as heat processed meals and therefore bring with them the identical fitness dangers. Feeding any meals completely, not to mention a nondescript packaged food containing who-knows-what from the who-knows-what manufacturing environment, is a bad choice if fitness and safety are of problem. (See The Truth About Pet Foods with the aid of Dr. Wysong).
4. Problems Are Ignored By Producers – RF meals pathogens include no longer the handiest bacteria but fungi, viruses, and parasites. Toxins encompass those molds (mycotoxins), microorganisms, and people created by way of oxidation. In our examination of RF products within the circulation of trade, not one producer addressed these concerns with any technological understanding that we ought to determine, and most did now not even acknowledge the issues probably lurking in their meals.
5. Freezing Masks Inedibles – Raw meat and organ tissue continue to use ATP (source of power) till it’s miles exhausted and the tissue enters a kingdom of rigor. Endogenous enzymatic pastime inside the tissue continues to digest the muscle groups (proteolysis), softening it until it becomes tender and develops the everyday palatable taste. This process is retarded by way of bloodless. The freezing of nicely elderly meat gives few issues. Still, any residual ATP present inside the tissue at some point of freezing will contract the muscle upon thawing, ensuing in a greater unpalatable product. Mixed RF ingredients might disguise this trouble.
6. Free Radical Problems Masked – Essential fatty acids and other fitness-enhancing lipids are critical within the weight loss plan. Once foods are ground, combined, uncovered to air, light, and seasoned-oxidants such as heme iron and other metals found in plant and animal tissue, the contained lipids are oxidized to chain response generating unfastened-radicals, inflicting rancidity and oxidant toxins. Freezing at correctly low temperatures slows this technique; however, it does not prevent it. The temperature in traditional freezers used for RF meals isn’t insurance in opposition to such oxidation. Because the frozen state masks olfactory detection of rancidity, ingredients that might be otherwise rejected come to be being fed on, the free-radical pathology capability can then paintings its chronic degenerative sickness and immune weakening outcomes.
7. Freezer Burn Indicates A More Serious Problem – Air accomplishing the beef floor is the reason for the freezer burns that result in the typical grayish-brown leathery spots. Frozen water at the surface or just underneath it sublimates (from strong country at once to vapor) into the air, inflicting moisture to be lost from the meat through the years resulting in discoloration and a dry, leathery texture. Proper packaging helps preserve best and prevent freezer burn. However, maximum packaging is permeable tothe air. The occurrence of freezer burn in RF products speaks to the truth that the product is being oxidized and, with that, growing loose radical pollutants to put the seeds for numerous degenerative illnesses.
