Many proactive, integrative, and holistic veterinarians have long recognized the nutritional drawbacks to commercially available dry pet food.
Most popular dry formulas don’t contain clean ingredients – those approved for human consumption – and they aren’t biologically balanced for obligate carnivores (cats), and scavenging carnivores (dogs).
However, in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, we saw the production of better quality dry foods that contained more diverse ingredients. Coincidentally, during this same period, pet owners began to see the benefits of home-cooked diets because they could control the quality of the food they fed their dog or cat.
Although improvements to commercial dry pet foods addressed some of the quality control issues — and began to address the biological appropriateness of ingredients – they didn’t address one important fact. Companion animals were still consuming an entirely dead, inorganic, over-processed diet that was extruded and cooked at very high temperatures, rendering it devoid of any of the health benefits of living foods.
