Class Action Lawsuit Against Purina

Reziac

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Our current vet hasn't pushed a dog food on us, but recently, my dog started showing some hip problems and the vet suggested we get some weight off her.

This is best done with a high-protein, high-fat diet WITH a grain component (preferably wheat or corn, not just rice alone), but feed her less of it... the fat and protein will keep her feeling satisfied and the grain will prevent that "gotta steal cookies" thing. (Probably caused by B-vitamin deficiency.) And get her to normal weight, but NOT "thin" -- if she's thin, she's also lost muscle and supportive tissue (especially true on the typical low-nutrient "weight loss" diet), which will make her hips MORE unstable. Also, the last thing you want is to get her into calcium deficiency, because that can cause arthritic changes in unstable joints. (Same with too much vit.D or C.)

High fibre as a weight loss scheme in dogs... well, they lose muscle mass and they're hungry ALL the time, how is that better?? and consider that the canine gut doesn't handle fibre near as well as does the human gut, and think how uncomfortable your guts would be if you chowed down on peanut hulls. (Also, current research on gut bacteria indicates that a high fibre diet develops a gut flora balance that encourages weight gain.)

BTW "old dog head" (where they get all bony and sunken-looking) is caused by protein deficiency, not by age. Older dogs need more protein, not less. And yes, there is good research on this (tho it was flaming-obvious to me just from experience).
 

cornflake

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Our current vet hasn't pushed a dog food on us, but recently, my dog started showing some hip problems and the vet suggested we get some weight off her. We've been working really hard with her current food (which is the only we've found that she'll eat reliably) and exercise, but the vet did say that if we couldn't manage it, she'd want to talk about putting Maddie on Science Diet.

I flailed around, which is what I do when someone tries to make me buy Science Diet, so the vet explained that Science Diet is the most transparent with vets about their nutrition profiles and studies regarding their food for treating obesity, kidney problems, etc. She said she's sure there are other good foods out there; it's just that she doesn't have the same mountain of data from those companies to feel comfortable officially recommending and selling. I.e., it's easier for her to predict exactly what the Science Diet will do, whether that's better or not.

The word "holisitc" by itself doesn't have anything to do with quackery and snake oil.

Granted, a lot of quackery and snake oil have attached themselves to the word, but the word itself is not indicative of such... I'd just do your research before you opt in to any treatment. But holistic medicine can be a great thing.

My vet offered a selection of samples of the prescription food needed and, when I protested that they were all crap from crap companies (and she didn't so much disagree - in the 'they're not great, and yes, some of the companies and their ingredient sourcing is suspect and their ingredients are kind of crap, but they meet the nutrient levels and animals can do well on them' way) offered a service from a major vet teaching hospital that will (for a minor fee) work up a homemade diet that meets your pet's prescription diet needs, and when I found a very small-market food she'd never heard of, was open to it, but asked me to send her the info on it, including the study I'd found and the info from the company, so she could look it over before she said whether she felt it was ok or not.

That indicates the same thing - that they know the info from the ones they stock, which would make sense. I was willing to do more research, and she was willing to too, but otherwise...


Indeed! One order of Soylent Green, coming right up!

I'm serious though.

Vets are not nutritionists (and you can't be a good nutritionist without first being a biochemist). They are doctors.** They are rarely experts on animal topics outside of canine medicine. In over 40 years as a canine professional, I've seen exactly one vet who knew the first thing about nutrition beyond what's printed on the bag. Science Diet is all about marketing, and they are very, very good at that. They have 40 years of "it's so good that we only allowed it to be sold through vets" behind 'em. This is just as convincing to the average veterinarian as it is to average consumers.

** Well, the older ones are. More recent graduates are being taught marketing more than medicine. I've seen some that I wondered if they learned surgery from their local butcher. :(

[I was a biochem/microbiology double major, back-when. I still have a few clues about this stuff.]

The wonder isn't that salmonella is occasionally found in chicken products (pet or human). Rather, that it's not an everyday problem. Know why you're advised to keep raw chicken away from other food, wash your hands after touching raw chicken, etc??

Salmonella is not a contaminant. It is a natural inhabitant of poultry. If you have chickens, you have salmonella. So the problem isn't keeping it out of the food chain, but rather preventing the existing salmonella from becoming a health issue. So we wash and cook our chicken for human consumption. And scrap meat/byproducts such as goes into pet food are heat-processed (ie. cooked) to kill bacteria, but like all bulk processes, it isn't perfect.

Incidentally, salmonella is found naturally in chickens' ovaries. Layer chicks are dosed with tetracycline to kill it off, and this is why we no longer have a problem with salmonella in eggs (at least, if produced in a modern facility that eliminates contact with natural sources of salmonella), despite that we use billions of eggs, and not always cooked.

Oooookay. Let's see if I can clear up some misunderstandings about how commodities and bulk manufacturing works.

There are NO vertical manufacturers (that is, who control every stage of production from raw materials to finished product) in the dog food industry. The only one with even a nod to that is Purina, because they do run a big farm and research facility. (And its production wouldn't cover a day's worth of dog food, nor all the ingredients.) Everyone buys major ingredients from the commodities market.

And here's how that works (somewhat crudely, as this isn't my field):

--Farmer grows raw material (grain, chickens, whatever).
--Broker buys raw material, which is then pooled with raw materials bought from tens of thousands of farmers. (And the edible waste from human food processing, such as peelings from the potatoes that go into chips. Chicken in dog food got to be a big thing as a byproduct of Chicken McNuggets.)
--Broker sells bulk lots raw material to a processing facility, such as a flour mill or rendering plant. What they get comes from a common pool of such material, not necessarily from the same lots the broker bought from the farmers. (A lot of it gets moved around on paper.)
--Processing facility does its thing and sells the bulk ingredient (now turned into flour or meat meal or whatever) to a commodities broker.
--Commodities broker pools that with product from perhaps dozens of other facilities. It may even be pooled with imported product. (That is, when you order 50 tons of X, the broker orders 50 tons from whatever sources he has on the hook. It isn't stored all in one place. Some may be in a silo in North Dakota and some on a barge in Long Beach Harbor.)
--Pet food manufacturer contracts for N-many tons of various ingredients (which come from various brokers and various pooled sources). They have NO control over where the ingredients came from or how they were processed up the line, tho they can specify grade, or sometimes country of origin.

This is true for human food too, for pretty much anything on your grocery shelves that isn't flat out labeled "locally produced".

The ingredient is inspected multiple times all along the line -- as raw material, processed material, on arrival at the dog food plant, during production, and as a finished product. [In wet years, cereal grains undergo extra inspections because wet weather at harvest increases the risk of aflatoxins from naturally-occuring fungus.] But you can't inspect every bit of the several million pounds in any single batch. So samples are taken -- one bag out of some tens of thousands of bags is good practice.

And if anywhere along the line a contaminant is found, the entire batch is discarded (or recalled), because the assumption has to be made that it is a batch issue and not a spot issue. Fact is most probably ARE spot issues, but they don't take the chance. The flipside is that spot issues will be missed, because you can't open and inspect every bag nor every nugget from every bag, and that is what you'd have to do to catch every spot issue. (This is why once in a blue moon you'll find a whole chicken foot in a bag of dog food.)

Far more is discarded (well, more likely recycled into fish food) and recalled before it ever hits the retail shelves than the consumer ever hears about -- in fact over 90% of recalls happen before the product reaches the retail market.

This is the reality of bulk production. It is not perfect at any level, because the sheer volume required means it cannot be perfectly controlled or perfectly tested.

And the total volume is so huge that a tiny fraction of a percent deemed 'bad' translates into 50,000 bags recalled. This is not "lousy quality control". This is the average consumer having no idea what a miniscule fraction of the product that really is, or how the entire process works, or how well best-practices keep naturally-occurring contaminants down to a minimum.

To add to the confusion, very few dog food brands actually own their feed mill; doing so is simply too expensive (millions of dollars in startup costs). Most contract the production process to Diamond or Mars, or less often to Purina or various smaller manufacturers; or more rarely and for very small volumes, to a privately-owned feed mill (which is what I did. Minimum batch nowadays is typically five tons.)

The majority of premium-brand pet food on the market is actually made by Diamond. Used to be you could reliably ID any Diamond-made product by "made in Meta, Missouri" on the label, but they've since acquired some other facilties.

I know salmonella is all over chicken; I live in the world. I don't care, particularly, as it's less likely to affect me and I don't care if it affects people who eat chicken.

I meant it was a batch problem - it sounded from the 'one bag' that S_F was suggesting the company pulled the product for a single issue. I was suggesting it was a different thing if they'd found the one bag that came back from a consumer or retailer, which could indicate contamination from having opened someplace along the shipping trail and been contaminated that way, or if the bag was one they pulled off the line for inspection, which would indicate contamination of the entire run, which wouldn't be a single bag issue.
 
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Reziac

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I meant it was a batch problem - it sounded from the 'one bag' that S_F was suggesting the company pulled the product for a single issue. I was suggesting it was a different thing if they'd found the one bag that came back from a consumer or retailer, which could indicate contamination from having opened someplace along the shipping trail and been contaminated that way, or if the bag was one they pulled off the line for inspection, which would indicate contamination of the entire run, which wouldn't be a single bag issue.

When it's a consumer-opened report, then tests are run back up the line where they still have sealed product. If it's determined to be a real problem (not just "idiot user left it out in the rain"), the recall goes out to the end retailers, not just to the manufacturer.

Feed mills meticulously track every ingredient, precisely so any problems can be backtracked, halted, and the point of entry identified (which will typically be in a bulk ingredient, not due to an issue inside the feed mill itself). That minimizes financial loss -- it would be pretty stupid to keep on running the machinery after you ID a problem, get it recalled on down the line, and then have all that cost of manufacturing that you can't recoup.

If they're all 50 pound bags, 50,000 bags is 1250 tons. Over 8 million tons of pet food are sold in the U.S. every year. The object of today's discussion is a microscopic percentage of that.

In the first world, we're not used to bad food at any level, not even in livestock feed. Problems are so proportionately rare that each incident sticks out like a sore thumb (and bumps into the human inability to evaluate rare risks). Issues in pet food are beyond rare given the huge volumes involved. Yet people seize on each incident like the whole industry is corrupt. Could they achieve such a high percentage of "no problems found" in their own work? I doubt it.

Check out these recalled products -- which ones do you use??
http://www.fda.gov/Safety/Recalls/
What's interesting is how many of these are relatively small producers and premium brands -- rather more than their share of the market.
 
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Okyrah

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Good! They should have been shut down a long time ago! Innova isn't safe either I bet since being bought out by Proctor & Gamble! Sad you can't trust half the companies in charge of developing safe and nutritious food for our pets!