Good evening, everybody, and welcome to tonight's webinar. My name is Bruce Stevenson and I have the honour and privilege of chairing tonight's session. Before I get into any housekeeping, I just want to say a very big thank you to our sponsors, Ts.com.
It's their generous sponsorship is allowing us to bring you this, hot topic this evening. And, knowing Sean, he's going to throw a bit of spice in there as well. But before we get to our speakers, just a little bit of housekeeping.
We are recording the session, so, it will be up on the webinar vet website in the next 24 to 36 hours. So if you missed something on a slide, we can't go back to them tonight, but you will be able to go and watch the recording and fast forward and rewind and pause to your heart's content. You may need it when we come to all the references at the end.
For those of you that want to ask any questions, if you just move your mouse over the screen, the control bar will pop up. It's usually a little black bar at the bottom, and there's a chat box. Click on that, put all your questions in there, and we will hold all of those over to the end, and we will get through as many as we can.
Those that we don't get through, we will, pass on and ask Pretty Pretty, please for Sean and Fiona to, give their answers to that. So it is my great pleasure tonight to, reintroduce Doctor Sean McCormick, who qualified as a veterinary surgeon from the University College in Dublin in 2010, after also completing an undergraduate Bachelor of Science degree in Animal Sciences. With a keen interest in nutrition, animal welfare, and conservation, Sean has spent six years in clinical practise with a domestic pet, zoo, and exotic caseload.
In 2016, he took on an industry role in what was then a new tech food startup called Tails.com, and we all know how well that is doing. He returned to the world of conservation by setting up the Ealing Wildlife Group, a community conservation group in West London, where he also has spearheaded the reintroduction of the Eurasian beavers to London at the Ealing Beaver Project.
Our second speaker tonight is Fiona Firth, who brings with her over 20 years of experience in the pet food industry, focusing on animal nutrition. Her work at Tails.com involves researching key nutritional topics and evaluating the benefits of various ingredients, ensuring that each component is thoroughly assessed for its impact on canine health before its inclusion in product formulations.
Fiona is also involved in regulatory compliance and collaborates with a team of food technologists to guarantee the safety and quality of all the recipes that are developed. In addition to her nutritional expertise, Fiona is a qualified small-animal hydrotherapist and canine massage therapist. Guys, welcome to the webinar, vet, and it's over to you.
Thanks very much, Bruce for that lovely intro and thank you everyone who's joining. If you've been around the webinar vet a long time, like I have, I kind of covered this topic many moons ago, nearly 10 years ago, I think we did a, a kind of myths and misconceptions in pet food, but we wanted to come back to the community and talk about the same topic because things have moved on since then. And there's evidence growing for and against certain trends and this, new information coming out all the time.
So hopefully tonight will not be a rehash, but certainly a refresh of, what we talked about 9 or 10 years ago on the webinar that. Bruce has given a great intro to both myself and Fiona, who'll be talking to you tonight, just to say I forgot to write it on this slide, but as a conflict of interest statement. We are both employed by Tails.com.
Tails.com are primarily a cooked dry food brand, and we also have wet food and cooked wet food and a whole treats range as well as some supplements and enrichment that we include in our subscription service as well. So we, we do come from a fairly traditional pet food brand in terms of the kind of products we Believe in and our ingredient sourcing and things like that.
And I am speaking as an evidence-based vet and passionate, you know, animal, dog welfare and person and to try and really pick apart some of the myths and misconceptions and marketing claims and things that abound in the pet food space and often cause confusion for your clients and dog owners in general. So, it's a massive, massive topic, you know, talking about myths and misconceptions in pet food. Who knew that pet food would be so contentious, eh, Fiona?
Yeah, it's, it's been, it's surprising, you know, it surprised me when I entered this kind of industry role, nearly 10 years ago, just how contentious it can be. The fundamental reason I think is that, you know, people love their pets and pets are very important and they're becoming, you know, more and more, part of the family in a way they're also becoming. More and more humanised in some ways, and we're seeing that reflected in in how we feed them as well.
But there's loads and loads of different trends. We really wanted to focus on the five kind of main topics that we get most questions on and that we see a lot of confusion on in terms of the kind of dog owning public and what they're reading online or what they're being marketed to buy. So raw feeding is the first topic that I'm going to cover and then Fiona's going to take the reins on insect protein, plant-based diets, ultra processed foods, and what does that mean?
And a little bit of background on marketing claims and how to kind of decipher them and how to flag ones that maybe are a little bit dubious. So, current pet food trends, the big one, I think, which we've all seen. Rise and rise in popularity is raw food and to a lesser extent or more recent extent, fresh cooked food as well.
These formats are becoming more and more common. So 16% of dog owners, 12% of cat owners have bought fresh food for their pets, commercially available fresh food that you keep in the fridge or freezer. Raw food, so uncooked, ingredients, purchases accounts for 13% of dogs and 8% of cats.
I think 10 years ago when I did this topic before, we were at about 4 to 5% of dogs and very few cats. So it is something that's on the, on the rise. It's very much mainstream.
I think if you're out and about and talking to dog owners and you ask them what they eat, I don't do that anymore because, it's kind of bringing work home and I don't want to let The public know what I do because you get into a half an hour conversation, which would be 5 minutes otherwise I talk about the dog. But if I did ask, you know, what do you feed your dog, more and more people are saying, oh, I feed raw, or sometimes I feed a mixture of, you know, kibble and some raw, that's a, that's a trend, growing trend too. We're seeing the kind of, we're seeing the credibility and the quality.
And the, I guess, kind of governance and, and, and safety around raw food being taken more and more seriously with UK Pet Food, who are formerly the Pet Food Manufacturers Association, PFMA. They now have a raw food group, because some of their members are raw brands, commercially available raw brands, and there's even a raw feeding veterinary Society if you, are that way inclined and want to promote and advocate responsible raw feeding for your clients' pets. So do take a look at those.
But I really wanted to start on why has this trend come about? Why is this trend growing in popularity? What's some of the reasoning behind it?
And, and I think it harks back really to the sort of trend in human nutrition that we've seen because a lot of pet food trends do follow what their, you know, owners are into and what their owners are kind of subscribing to in terms of nutritional philosophy, health philosophy. A lot of that is tied up in the kind of ancestral, natural or holistic type trend, wrong use of the word holistic, I would say, but maybe like naturopathic kind of trends as well. We're seeing this sort of, Claims, marketing claims and packaging imagery and things which really is kind of promoting the dog as a wolf and recognising that the the wolf ancestor is where our dogs came from.
I think it's important just to mention at this stage that the grey wolf we know today and and the domestic dog are very, very different, although they can hybridise and and produce fertile young. The definition as we know it of species has changed with with DNA advances and things like that and genome advances. But, domestic dogs are not the same as grey wolves, and we'll talk about why that's really important when we're talking about ingredients and digestion in particular.
But the dog is wolf theory has really been debunked. They both derived from a common wolf ancestor, and they're very, very different creatures, which we'll get to. I think it's good to say at the start that there is just as unfortunately, this audience knows, there's a growing distrust and a very loud voices speaking out at the moment, in particular about the veterinary profession and are we trustworthy as a profession.
There's, a similar kind of vibe of a distrust in the pet nutrition sector. Certainly distrust in big pharma rolls into distrust in big pet food. And there's even been documentaries in Netflix and film about big pet food and you know what, what the pet food companies are hiding from you.
So there is an issue there with trust and transparency. Sometimes for good reason, you know, we've have had, historic kind of recalls of food and food scandals in the pet food sector which have created some of that distrust and then a lot of people who maybe have their own products to sell kind of capitalise on that sense of fear and distrust. And, the other thing to say is biologically appropriate.
This comes back to, you know, the dog is wolf hypothesis. What's biologically appropriate for, a wild animal, wild can, eating prey in the wild is not necessarily the same for the domestic dog. The domestic dog is by definition, a scavenging omnivore, not a carnivore.
And the domestication of the dog that happened in various points throughout the world at various points in time up to 30 to 40,000 years ago, as, as we know from, the most recent evidence, what happened there was dogs became the dog ancestors became scavenging omnivores around our settlements when we turned from nomadic hunter gatherers to, agriculturalists. And one of the early kind of revolutions in in agriculture was the domestication of cereals, plants, starches, and cereals, and the dog developed the ability, largely through a gene called malaise 2B to digest plant starches, but there's various different genetic differences between the, the grey wolf and the dog today that set it apart, not as a carnivore, but as a scavenging omnivore. And then cats, of course, are obligate carnivores.
They need meat in their diet to get their full complement of amino acids and and nutrient requirements. And if we were going to really talk about biologically appropriate diets for dogs, and I'm being a little bit facetious here, we might say that, you know, the faeces of other animals would be in their biologically appropriate diet. They're coprophagic by nature.
If we were really to talk about biologically appropriate diets for cats, we would be feeding all of our cats, birds and mice in their bowls, not necessarily cat kibble or raw food, from, you know, large herbivore farm animals either, so. Some of these terms are very compelling and tell a good story and can be used to kind of convince dog or pet owners in general, what they should be doing because it seems to make sense. But actually some of the terms are not really passing scrutiny if we really dig down into them.
So, I also wanted to talk about the kind of evidence versus anecdote conundrum. A lot of the claims made around raw feeding in particular, and actually a lot of the new ways of feeding a lot of the claims, are really about anecdote rather than truly kind of standing up to rigorous review. And we see the pyramid, the evidence pyramid here, where, you know, expert opinion.
Is really, really down at the bottom of the pyramid and anyone can call themselves an expert, especially on the internet and on social media. We have so many animal nutritionists that don't really have much in the way of qualification, but they're calling themselves animal nutritionists. It's not a protected term, and right up to systematic peer review and and controlled trials and things like that.
And unfortunately for raw advocates, we're not seeing really rigorous and scientific studies that really demonstrate tangible benefits of raw feeding. I will talk about some of the benefits and some of the considerations we have when we're analysing those kinds of studies. But it's, it's kind of interesting to watch when owners change their food philosophy for their pet.
In any direction, whether they come from raw back to cooked, whether they're going from cooked to fresh food, whether they're going from kibble to wet food or just changing brand of diet, lots of pet owners report a change in their, in their animal, and that's not necessarily to do with the type of food they've changed to. It can be just due to a commitment to change the diet. So, not all of the kind of Not all of the benefits that are attributed to raw food are actually because the food is raw.
You do often get the reports, my dog was itchy and allergic and all his allergies have cleared up because I've changed to raw. Actually, what you've done there maybe is you've instead of had your dog on 27 different ingredients per month, they're now on 3. You've simplified the diet or you've excluded a lot of treats and things with different ingredients that your dog was reactive to.
Raw feeding didn't improve your dog's symptoms. A rigorous change in diet. So there's, you know, that's, that's kind of a message that we want to try and and and get across.
As I said, lots of very, very loud. Voices online, the raw movement, you know, has become, quite, powerful, and, you know, I, I'm not going to call it the C word that some people say, but there is a very strong kind of tribalism, element to it sometimes that people can get caught up in and, you know, believe that we're the enlightened ones because I can't believe this, this worked for my dog, therefore it must work for every dog. I'm making a bigger special commitment and I'm doing something new.
That's a powerful psychological driver of, of, kind of believing anecdote over evidence as well. I would say one of the things that most frustrates me about the really, really loud and passionate kind of raw feeding advocates. That don't necessarily hold themselves to a lot of rigour in terms of evidence, is that one of the Subconscious subconsciously or not, but one of the techniques they seem to use is a little bit of, kind of shaming or guilt tripping and pet owners for feeding the wrong food or traditional food.
There's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of kind of kibble shaming and and things like this, to try and Move people over to raw feeding. I don't think that's helpful, you know, we're in a cost of living crisis. People do the best by their pets and every dog is different, every owner is different, and, the right food for the right dog, doesn't have to be a binary, you know, raw versus cooked.
So I think there is a lot of unfortunately negative marketing against other brands or traditional ways of feeding, and there's a lot of guilt tripping of pet owners which I don't think is really helpful. So what are the potential benefits of raw feeding? We are seeing in some studies and definitely reports, anecdotal reports, improved stool quality.
That's in some pets I've put here, because it's the opposite in others, we do have, you know, reports of dogs, or owners reporting their dog has had tremendous diarrhoea or really upset stomach or it's exacerbated some conditions when they've got tried raw and they would never try it again. So that moves in both directions. It's also important to say improved stool quality.
Is that always a sign that it's a healthier stool, or is it just the owners reporting they can pick them up better because they're smaller, you know, or there's not much fibre or bulk in a raw meat diet potentially. We're seeing in some studies a tendency to have a leaner body condition score. As we know, body condition score and weight is a result of calories in and calories out, and you can have an obese pet on raw food, just as much as you can have an obese pet on cooked food.
So that's not necessarily, again, a a benefit of the raw food state, it's ways of feeding. And we have in this interesting study that came out recently, improved riches and diversity of gut bacteria. So the microbiome is an area that we are seeing incredible research coming out in, but we still don't know a lot about it in in the dog, and, and hopefully that's going to change fairly soon, but, in some studies, we're seeing differences in gut bacteria and also differences.
There's a great study in atopic dogs of the skin microbiome changing. If a dog is fed and cooked food versus raw, but we don't know that those changes correlate to improved clinical outcomes or reductions in HP. They're just differences, due to diet.
It's seen as natural, less processed, that's fair enough, I suppose, and lots of commercial options available that are balanced and complete and have have been formulated by professionals. So if we are going to talk to our clients about raw feeding. My main bit of advice would be to push them in the direction of UK pet food where they've got kind of all the information, fact sheets, and, a list of suppliers that are, you know, adhering to FEDF guidelines on formulation and so on.
Some commercial options use high pressure processing which can increase the safety profile of raw raw food. We do know obviously that raw food can contain pathogens and freeze dried raw food is also becoming popular, but that still, we need to watch out for hygiene. Of that.
Here's some considerations, I think, just as kind of like warning of what the main, main, issues that I would have, personally and a lot of vets who are evidence-based would, kind of warn with raw feeding. Two main, I can think categories. One is the nutritional profile of the foods, especially if it's a DIY homemade kind of formulations and diets at home.
Countless, countless studies show that imbalances are rife if you do that. The second category of concern really is about the microbiological concerns. I'm just going to show you some examples here.
There was a study this year on 112 raw cat foods, and many of them contaminated with pathogens and pathogens that had antimicrobial resistant genes in them, and those pathogens were being shed in faeces of those cats fed those raw diets. We often hear that, oh, dogs and cats are tough. They're designed to eat raw meat, therefore, you know, they're not going to become ill.
This is kind of hyped up. Pets do become ill. In 2018, there was a very high profile raw venison recall.
I'm not going to name any brands. I do, do not like negative marketing, but I'm just stating the fact that these things do happen. There's over 90 UK cats infected.
I think the mortality rate, early on in that outbreak was something quite high, like 83%. So there was a number of cats dying from TB contamination, which obviously is zoonotic as well, and these foods were being kept in people's home kitchen, . Fridge and freezer.
US cats have died from food contaminated avian influenza, and the more recently there has been a feline TB outbreak. It's been widely circulated by the pet owning community who have had very ill cats or have lost their cats sadly, and They do have on these forums, they do have all one raw food brand in common, but there's been no admission or recall by that brand as there was in 2018. In terms of microbiological screening, the only thing that you're required to screen for in, under FDF, legislation is salmonella, and Enterobacteria ACA.
So the presence of salmonella, you have to, discard, the, the product, but, Enterobacteria ACA have tolerable limits. There's no requirement to test for other pathogens that do turn up and cause illness both in people and animals, things like Listeria, Campylobacter, and so on. Other considerations I've said about the kind of nutritional imbalances, I won't go into that in detail, conscious of time.
There are, hazards if people are feeding, you'll often see it referred to as RMBD, so that can either mean raw meat-based diets or raw meaty bones diets. So, I had a client a long time ago who fed huskies, entire pigs' heads on our kitchen floor and said they're basically wolves, that's what they would eat in the wild. Knock yourself out.
I won't be feeding pigs' heads on the on the kitchen floor, but and there is a real issue with, feeding bones that, you know, you're going to have blockages or perforations or Surgical issues with those kind of hazards. And there's some environmental and sustainability considerations as well. I talked about dehumanisation of of our pets and premiumization of pet foods and that does drive a trend for, less sustainable ingredients to get into pet food.
I'm talking about this. Again, marketing term of we only put in choice cuts of human grade meat. Well, actually, under legislation, UK and EU legislation, all of the meat and animal products, meat and animal byproducts, meat and animal derivatives, whatever legal label labelling term you want to use, they all come from animals that are fit for human consumption.
They just happen to be the parts of the animal we don't tend to eat. So just putting in chicken breasts and fillet steak into your dog's diet is actually really, really, really upping their carbon paw print and not very sustainable and not very good for animal welfare either if we're not utilising those, those byproducts of the human food chain. We see some studies showing owners of raw fed dogs are more likely to use supplements, and possibly, you know, dabble in kind of home formulation, but also to engage in sports activities with their pet, which is quite interesting.
In terms of contradictions, I do like to kind of just, pull out some of the holes in the arguments, and some of the things that people say about raw feeding being this incredible thing and and actually kind of sometimes contradict themselves. So the species appropriate or biologically appropriate philosophy does ignore the domestication process and how dogs digest food and cats even and digest plants, starches and things as well. Animal byproducts and meat and animal derivatives.
We were at BVNA congress, last weekend, the weekend before last, and, some people were coming up to us and asking, you know, why do we use animal byproducts in our, in our food at tails.com. And I said, we're very proud of using animal byproducts because again, it's just the parts of the animal that we don't eat and it's nutritious, delicious, and arguably biologically appropriate for our pets to be eating that.
I think one of the kind of funny things, the things I find funny is that you see when we went back, here on this slide and showed, you know, this delicious bowl of raw food, which has meat and eggs and berries and all sorts of things in it, necks and, and offal and all this kind of stuff. Is often kind of touted as brilliant, biologically appropriate. This is what we should be putting in our food, and, you know, some people will claim, as I say here, it's, you know, the magic elixir of life when you take that effort and put all of these things into your animal's bowl.
But if we use it as a commercial cooked food brand, offal, connective tissue, meat parts that, you know, aren't choice cuts, apparently then it's junk food because it's cooked and it's given a shelf life and it's given a safety profile because cooking, you know, eliminates pretty much all pathogens from it. So it is a contradiction in terms, and the other inconvenient truth I think is that, you know, we've had. Generations and generations and billions and billions of pets living to ripe old ages on traditional food.
So, you know, you would swear from some people advocating for raw feeding that, you know, animals just don't live or do well on traditional food when they do. So I'll stop banging that drum. I hope it's fairly balanced, and there's loads of references coming by the way, so you'll be able to read a lot of the studies that we've taken these highlights from, but I'm going to hand over to, Fiona to talk about some of the other trends that we're seeing in pet food.
Thank you, Sean. Yeah, so we're starting with insects, a little bit novel, a little bit different. You've probably seen that there's quite a few products out there on the market already.
Mostly for dogs rather than for cats, but you can get cat food, with some insects in, often in combination with other meats as well though. The problem, the main problem with insects, because it's not something we've. Discounted using it tails, in the future, is the, palatability.
It's, it's, at the moment, it's, it's not great. So it can really put them off eating it, unfortunately. And the ick factor for the owners.
So some owners don't particularly want to, to feed insects, . It's also currently very, very costly, er, so I, I, I'm sure that will actually decrease in the future as it becomes more and more mainstream, but, it's quite an expensive ingredient, to get hold of at the moment. But there's a few different types.
So, black soldier fly larvae, as you can see, mealworms, crickets are being used. There's been studies on cockroaches as well, but yeah, next slide please, Sean. So the potential benefits, are the environmental benefits.
So less land use, less water, reduced CO2. They can be fed waste feed stuff. So like bakery products, so your roll bread and buns and cakes, those sorts of things.
. And there's chitin or chitin, I can never quite remember how to pronounce that, can be actually used as a prebiotic. There's been some really good studies with that. As you'll see on the next slide though, there is a slight issue with digestibility and how that affects how animals can actually digest the protein in it.
So it's a little bit of one of those subjects that, as we always say, more research is needed. Insect meal, however, has been shown to have some really good antioxidant, antioxidant, of activity. And there's some acids in there, glutamic acid and aspartic acid that give that sort of umami taste, that sort of really nice savoury, delicious taste.
So if you can get the balance right, and maybe not have too much or the right type of insect, then maybe you can get that, that palatability right. One of the more interesting studies that's going on is that, black soldier flies are actually a good source of, medium chain triglycerides, loric acid. So, as you're probably aware, there's a lot of research on that to do with, epilepsy in dogs and those kinds of studies and, to do with, the brain.
So that's a possible area of really interesting research going forwards, but again, more research. And, it's suitable for pets with allergies because it's a novel protein source. So it's something that, again, would be an alternative to some of your, meats that might be novel that are now becoming more and more, you're getting.
More and more boutique, type of recipes. So things like venison, for example, that might have used to be novel, is sort of creeping more into mainstream foods. And so insects might be a good alternative if you've got animals that have allergies.
So yeah, the digestibility, the problem with the exoskeleton of those insects is that although it can be useful as a prebiotic, it also can block digestibility of protein. So it's a, it's a difficult balance to get it right. Some studies have been looking at how we can use insects by removing that exoskeleton or by processing it in a way so that the animal can use it.
The other problem is that when we're measuring those indigestible parts like the exoskeleton, the way that it's being measured is not, it's a very traditional way and it's not the same as how we would maybe measure the indigestible parts of an insect. It's more likely we've been measuring indigestible plant fibres. And so we're not really sure how accurate that is at the moment.
There are limiting amino acids, a bit like there are with plant proteins, which we'll talk about next, but, a good, complete, diet, you can, the manufacturer can supplement those in, so it's not necessarily a problem. And they do have those anti-nutrients, which can obviously be quite, upsetting for an animal, give them an upset stomach, make them feel poorly, or give the the food a bit of a bitter, horrible taste. But again, we can usually use some sort of processing technique to try and, make that a little bit more tasty for them.
One of the main considerations as well is the actual life stage of the insects. So it's they've got very different nutrient properties if they're a larvae or if they're a fully grown adult. So that's something that we need to take into consideration as well.
And as I mentioned earlier, they're, they're quite costly at the moment, so yeah, pretty expensive. So, plant-based diets. So this is really good.
Sean set me up for this really well cos he's mentioned quite a few things about this already. Again, there are quite a lot of foods out there, treats, mainly dog foods I would say that are plant-based, some cat foods. And again, yes, cats are obligate carnivores, so they need their animal tissue to provide that taurine and arachidonic acid.
There are some studies looking into some research, looking into how we could produce those from fermentation of fungi or algae, but it's very, very early stages yet, so there's not really enough to be able to, you know, say that that's progressing, er, well at the moment. And then for dogs, as Sean alluded to, they have evolved quite a lot since the days of the, the grey wolf. So there's quite a lot of changes that mean that they can digest a more omnivorous diet, that plant-based diet.
So there's. Skulls, there's, there's quite a few evidence of skulls somewhere in the period between the grey wolf and today's dog, where there's evidence of changes in the dental plasticity. So you've got a shallower jaw, you've got wider molars to reflect that more omnivorous diet.
There was also a study from an archaeological site from the Bronze Age a few years ago, which I think is really fascinating. And the dogs that they found on that site, I think it's amazing, they can tell what they were eating for a start. But they had remarkably almost identical diets to the cows.
That they also found on that archaeological site. So their diet was almost, entirely plant-based, mainly millet and grains. So, I mean, you know, that's thousands and thousands of years ago.
So they were eating plant-based omnivorous diets quite a long time ago. It's not a new thing. It's not something that, you know, has come about just since Kibble has been.
And about since dry food has been about. And then finally, there's quite a few genetic changes as well. So Sean mentioned the, amylase, so AMY2B that codes for, pancreatic amylase for digesting starch.
But there are other ones as well. So MGAM, dogs have a 12 times higher, . Level of that, and that's for, the the enzyme that hydrolyses or changes maltose into glucose.
So that's completely different to wolves, they have 12 times more. And SGLT1, that one is responsible for transport of glucose across the small, intestinal membrane. And again, dogs have a different, gene type for that, a different haplotype for that than wolves.
So there are those changes there. So plant-based diets, I would very much encourage you if you wanted to see the environment, environmental impact that you go back and look at the webinar that Sean did a few weeks ago, because that was all about sustainability and environment. And the evidence is, is pretty strong for this, that, you know, plant-based diet, it uses less carbon, it uses less water, it uses less land.
There are lots of benefits for, for changing to that from that point of view. If it's processed, if the ingredients are processed correctly, it can be really, really digestible. So I mentioned soya here, but that also includes grains.
If you're, cooking and you're heating and you're breaking down the starch, you're getting to that gelatin er you know, that gelatinization, then it can be much, much more easy to digest. The other thing about processing is, plants have anti-nutritional factors. And that's the thing that they create to stop her herbivores eating them.
So they either have a bitter taste or they might make them feel a little bit poorly if they eat them. So processing will actually, destroy a lot of those anti-nutritional factors. So it makes it safe and tasty for eating.
And then soy is probably the most common plant-based. Protein that's used at the moment, it's generally because it's high in protein, it's actually got a nice balance of amino acids, studies show that it can actually reduce cholesterol in both dogs and humans and, It's just, it, it's used in a lot of novel protein diets. So for example, in, in infants, human infants, it's used in as an alternative in in infant milk to cow's milk if they've got allergies.
And it's used in some of the veterinary therapeutic diets as a novel protein source as well, so there's quite a few benefits there. I think it's interesting to mention as well that last year, the British Veterinary Association changed their or updated their stance on plant-based diets, but only for dogs. So they now say that it is possible to feed a dog one of these, diets, plant-based diet.
But they do caveat that, you know, long term studies are lacking and, we need to make sure that we're monitoring their health, basically. So considerations. Soya, as we all know, unfortunately, er, there is a big issue with deforestation.
You can actually grow soya in Europe, and some people are doing that, but again, it comes down to cost. It's much more expensive. So hopefully in the future when that actually changes and the cost comes down, then we can actually use soya that's that's more local.
But for now, it's probably something that you can get sustainable soya, but it's, it's, you have to be very careful how you source that. You can get deficiencies, like Sean mentioned, if they're home prepared diets, then yeah, that is a real problem. Even if they're complete commercial diets, there can be some deficiencies.
Most recent study, which was this year, showed that, they studied some UK based dry plant-based diets. And the main deficiencies were iodine and B vitamins. Now that's actually pretty simple to solve.
You should actually be able to just, manufacturers should be able to just add in a few, of those just to top it up. So that should be fine. What I should mention though, is that they also, the same study also tested meat-based dry products, and they were deficient in a lot of vitamins and minerals as well.
And so this just highlights the importance of making sure that your clients are sourcing pet food from a reputable brand, a good company, probably one that's on the UK pet food, list of manufacturers, and that has a robust formulation and testing regime. Now you're no way you're gonna know what that testing regime is by just looking at the pack. So it is something that you're either if you have the time.
Or if your owner has the time, they would, you know, they could contact the manufacturer and ask them. And then I think it's important, this goes back to Sean's nice, triangle diagram of the studies and evidence. Some of the recent studies that showed that dogs and cats fed on plant-based diets were healthier, what we need to look at is that they were deemed healthier by the owner in a survey or questionnaire.
They weren't actually assessed by a vet to see if they were healthier. And some of them weren't fed, most of them weren't fed the plant-based diet exclusively. So they were eating other things, possibly treats that might have had meat in them.
And they might have been on a meat-based diet up until quite recently before the study. So there's, there's limitations to these things. And I've put, dilated cardiomyopathy as the last point there.
So, we might think that that has died down, but it's important to know that research is actually still ongoing in America. There's still quite a few new papers coming out every year about this, and there's still. Some concern about the high use of legumes and possibly a link to this condition.
We don't know is the answer, but I would say if you've got a breed, somebody with a breed of dog that is prone to cardiac problems, maybe a plant-based diet is not gonna be the best option for them. It's one of my favourite subjects, not just because I like cakes, but, Yeah, ultra processed food. So I've included this little quote, which is from a paper a couple of years ago, where they said that all dry pet food and canned pet food was ultra processed and raw and fresh food was classed as minimally processed.
However, the paper did say you cannot say that one is better than the other, either way round, so I thought that was quite nice. What it did also say though, and I thought this was a really interesting and valid point, especially for tonight's webinar, is that, vets could be eroding the nutritional confidence in their clients. They're only pushing, commercial pet food dry.
And canned food, if they're not just at least open to the discussion about having around about raw and fresh food. So if, and certainly anecdotally on social media, you can see posts where people that have owners that have wanted to feed raw, have gone to their vets, and if they haven't had that support, they've said, well, I've changed vets and gone to another practise. So it's worth just being able to have that conversation with them.
So ultra processed human food. So that's your cakes, your sweets, your fizzy drinks and all of those things that we love to eat that are junk food. They're high in sugar, they're high in salt, they're high in fats, full of colorings and additives, and they're usually quite deficient in a lot of, well, they're pretty, they're not designed to have vitamins and minerals in them.
They don't have fibre in them. There's different classifications though, and this is where it can get confusing. So, Quite a lot of things are processed, you know, whole grain bread is processed, but that's not classed as ultra processed.
Somebody's classed it as different. Yoghurt is processed, but it's not classed as ultra processed. So there is a, a little bit of confusion over what's classed as too processed and what's classed as processed and safe.
And that's where there can be difficulties in, in trying to do the research around it, . One study in humans, for example, found that total consumption of ultra processed food, actually increased the risk of type 2 diabetes. But some of the subgroups of ultra processed foods, which could have been things like yoghurts or dairy, might have been a subgroup, were actually associated with a lower risk.
So we need to get better with classifying these things before we can really do more research. What's the, apart from the sugar and fat and salt, what is the concern around ultra processed foods? So it's these ages, advanced glycation end products.
And if you remember back to your chemistry days, with the mallards. A reaction where you've got the amino acids and protein and the sugars, in carbohydrates, when they're cooked and heated, they create this lovely browning effect that you see on your toast or your steak, and the really nice, lovely taste that you get with that. Unfortunately, that reaction also creates these advanced glycation end products which have been associated with inflammation and disease.
So there's a lot of concern about this at the moment. The problem is that the body also produces them as not part of normal metabolism. And we do have mechanisms to remove those, as do our animals.
It's also theorised that a healthy gut microbiome might be able to break those down, and we know that gut microbiome studies are still in their infancy, so hopefully this is something we'll learn more about as we go on. And it's thought that not all of them are harmful. So this is something that it's good to be aware of this, but we just don't know enough about it as yet.
And then finally, I think what I was saying about classification is exactly what we should look at when it comes to pet foods. Should they really be classified as ultra processed? Because you can create dry dog foods and wet dog foods and cat foods that aren't high in sugar that don't have any sugar in them.
They could be low fat, they don't have to have added salt, they can be free of colours. We can use natural preservatives now, vitamin C, E, rosemary extract. They can be quite high in fibre.
So there's lots of differences there. They're also nutritionally complete. So they've got all the vitamins and minerals in it that a dog needs.
So this is very, very different to what the human ultra processed food is like. Processing makes food safer to eat, and kills bacteria, increases shelf life. It makes it more convenient and cost effective for the owner, so there's lots of benefits to, to being processed.
And as you can see, UK pet Food we have a a processed with purpose fact sheet for owners to download as well. And then finally, just a very quick run through on marketing claims, which is another of my favourite subjects. So, basically, in the UK we still follow FDA, which is the European pet food industry.
And they have labelling guidelines that, people can follow to make sure that your marketing is fair, basically. There are 3 types of things that make up a claim. So, the presence or absence of an ingredient.
So for example, when a food is marketed as grain-free. You've got specific specific nutritional characteristics, so this food is high in fibre. And then you've got a claim related to the function of these sorts of ingredients.
So for example, this food is grain free, therefore it's gonna stop your dog from itching. Those types of claims. So there's 3 different types.
And they're not just claims are not just to do with words, they can be pictures as well. So they we'll see in a minute that they can be visual, and they're not just on the bag of dog food or the tin of cat food or wherever. They can be on an advert, they can be social media, it could be on a stand at an event.
So there's lots of different places where a claim can be made. So these little pictures here of these prime cuts, these would be classed as misleading for pet food if they, if we had them on the packaging. That's because this is not what goes into pet food.
So this is what goes into human food, these prime cuts. And we basically have, everything else that's left, which is still a lot, as, as Sean said, you know, we've got nutritious offal, lots of. Other meats still available on there that's digestible, highly nutritious, dogs and cats love them.
But we should not be putting out images like this because that's not how the meat looks before it goes into the food, so this is classed as misleading. We can put an image, so a little chicken image, if we can do illustrations though, to, to tell people which species it's from. And there's a couple of other definitions that that FedDF have as well.
So if you see the word natural, they're very specific of what natural can mean, doesn't mean you're, it means you can't bleach thing or oxidise, but freezing is OK. Fresh is another one. So if you're saying that you're using fresh chicken, that chicken has to have arrived at the factory, completely fresh, just maintained in the cold chain.
It cannot have even been frozen or dried or anything. To be able to stay fresh, they're very strict on that. So there's quite a lot of legislation around this, at tails, and at other companies I've been in, to make sure that we stick to these marketing claims, we do everything fairly.
Obviously as, as the intro, as my lovely intro said. I do a lot of research on making sure we can substantiate these claims, you know, it, does this ingredient actually do what we're saying it does? Is the inclusion level right?
And we create dossiers so that we know that what we're actually saying on PAC or on a social media advert is correct and it isn't misleading. If you do see a pet food or a pet supplement, because they come under the same category, with a misleading claim, there are 3 different ways that they can be, regulated. So, the VMD.
And they're specifically looking for, medicinal claims. So you're not allowed to say that a food or a supplement will improve, repair, treat, or cure any kind of condition because that's considered medicinal, and these are not medicines. You've got trading Standards, which is, you know, making sure that you're, you're not misleading the public.
And you've got the Advertising Standards Agency. And just to, to wrap up this, just a little example of what, a complaint that they recently upheld, the, there was a fresh food company that, had been talking about the Kibble cartel, which was all the big dry food company. In cahoots with vets.
And they said that vets were getting paid $30,000 a year to sell their dry pet food, amongst other claims saying that we use diseased animals in, in pet food, which is not true. Anyway, the, yeah, the complaint was upheld because they had no evidence, basically. So, yeah, it was a good outcome in the end.
But yeah, just be careful what you say on the packaging. Thanks, thanks, Fiona. Yeah, we're bang on time, which is great.
Although I do realise I have an apology to make to Fiona because I was meant to take insect. And I handed it over to you too early. Sorry.
You did a great job. Yeah, as I said, we have loads and loads of further reading, so you'll get this when the recording goes online in a day or two. I just wanted to say we were at BVNA a couple of weeks ago.
It's great to see the vet nurse community there, but we're also going to be at London Vet show in November 2020 and 21st, and we're doing a little talk on the exhibitor stage as well, and we're exhibiting at sales.com. So if you do have any queries about us and what we do, please come and meet us, and myself and Fiona and our vet nurse RVN Amy Henson will be there as well on stand for the two days.
So looking forward to seeing everyone there. But for now, I think let's hand over to Question Time and see if there's any discussions to be had or or difficult questions for us, Fiona. Dawn, Fiona, thank you so much.
We really do appreciate, you being with us tonight and, for bringing up this hot topic again. And, yeah, it's, it's nice to see that there is a lot of progress that's being made and research that's being done, positive and negative. And, you know, as you've always said, the, you've got to just try and sort through.
What is the saying, the wheat from the chaff, which is quite appropriate, I think, at this, this evening. But, you know, my late dad always used to say, empty barrels make the most noise. And unfortunately, when it comes to social media, that's often the, the case, you know.
But, it's lovely to be able to have 3 pages of references. So, Fiona, I know you put all that together, so thank you for that, where people can go and actually read. You know, one of the comments that came through on the on the questions was when you were talking about, have this discussion with your clients, the person said, yeah, but there's not even enough time to talk about medical things, never mind discuss nutrition as well.
But, you know, you can give people these references, they can go and hopefully read themselves, but your point about, you know, not just bad mouthing something because it doesn't suit you, is, is really good. I think it was, I don't remember. Churchill or somebody that said a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.
So it doesn't matter what you say, the person has got to believe it for themselves. And, you know, all these false claims often do get people emotionally riled up, Sean, as you said, and, and that gets confused for belief, you know, the, the, and it's not. So, having the, the open-mindedness to be able to hand people stuff and say, look, go and read these, go and look them up, is, is really great.
And it's really nice that, a company like Tails.com not only sponsors us this evening, but also allows you guys to bring us this information so that people can make up their own minds and, you know, hopefully, based on fact rather than some empty barrel on social media. Yeah, thanks, Bruce.
I think I'm just directing, you know, people, clients, especially to the UK pet food website. There's lots of information on there and very easy to digest, pardon the pun, fact sheets, on various topics. So it's a good place to start, I would say, and they're doing great work now on, sustainability in particular and, and, just a lot of transparency on how pet food is made and, debunking some of the, you know.
Concern or or distrust around it. So yeah, there's a, there's great fact sheets on there. Yeah, that's excellent.
There's a comment about the insects and farming of insects and that, and the question is really, is it ethical or or is it bordering on unethical like it's claimed in the silk production industry? Do you wanna take that one, Fiona? Mhm.
Yeah, that's a really good question, I. I'm gonna say I don't know because I have seen a lot of ethical concerns around this. You know, it's, it's, it's that whole thing of do they, do they feel.
What's their pain pathways, you know, we're still understand trying to understand things, about that, . And yeah, it's, it's still farming. It's still a living, a living creature.
So, maybe the, maybe the alternative, which we didn't discuss tonight, but would be the, the lab grown meat, if we're looking for protein sources that are, that are completely, you know, without living, living animals in there. But yeah, I don't know a lot of detail about that. I'll be honest.
Yeah, I, I don't, I think there's, there's not a huge amount of evidence unfortunately for, you know, the welfare of insects. We can kind of often fall into the trap of, if we can't identify with it or see a facial expression on a creature, then, you know, we don't actually consider it's pain, suffering, welfare, etc. Certainly in terms of like dispatch and processing.
These individual insects are not getting, you know, humane, humanely killed individually one by one. Like I'm not sure for all pet food and insect protein production. What happens, but, a lot of it is kind of cooling, grinding, you know, processing mechanically from a live state.
So there are ethical ethical concerns there. And I just wanted to touch on something as well, like about plant-based food being marketed as the sustainable option and insect-based food being marketed as the sustainable option. We do have to recognise that actually, If you're trying to eradicate meat production or meat consumption, you know, for kind of vegan goals, then that's all well and good, but we do live in a society and a a global food production system that wastes a lot of food and produces a lot of animals for human consumption.
And one of the most sustainable things, if you look back at the webinar I did with Caroline Curtis, my colleague who sits on the sustainability committee, she's co-chair for UK Pet Food. If you look back at that, you'll see that one of the most impactful thing you can do is choosing your ingredients and in a system where we currently have, you know, thousands, millions of farm animals entering the human food chain and only a proportion of their bodies, entering the human food chain and the rest discarded. The most sustainable thing you can do is use those products which are legally labelled either meat and animal derivatives or animal by-products.
Those are not dirty words, those are not dirty phrases, those are really, really good quality food that we need to be utilising and what better place to utilise it than for our pets. It comes back to the whole emotional blackmail thing that you were talking about before, doesn't it? It's a complete lack of understanding.
So again, the empty barrels just shout out about the bad words. Yeah, and again, just on plant-based, I had a discussion, with a vegan campaigner about this, at BBNA, believe it or not, and, we were talking about like the impact, yes, of global, if we're going to go global plant-based diets and that. I'm, I'm a conservationist as well as a vet, so I'm talking and thinking about, well, industrial scale plant monocultures across the board is extremely bad for biodiversity.
For example, we're living in a climate crisis, but the lesser known, cousin of the climate crisis is the biodiversity crisis, and actually industrial scale agriculture of monoculture crops is really, really problematic too, because they need inputs and they need artificial inputs. And those inputs are getting into our rivers and just, you know, we're losing habitat to that kind of thing. So there's no right or wrong answer.
All of these things are sliding scales and grey scales and and unfortunately this whole kind of tendency these days to be very binary, black and white thinking, meat is bad, plant-based is good, but that doesn't hold up depending on how you, how you analyse it, you know. Yeah. Again, it comes back To the bias of the empty barrel that shouting the loudest at that point.
Fiona, there's a great point that's been made. You mentioned those studies that were done that came up deficient in all sorts of things, both dry and raw, and that. Were there any consequences and what was done about it?
It's all well and good to say they're not balanced, but Yeah, yeah. Not that I'm aware of, no. I do know that that that there was, there were some people on social media saying, you know, look at this, what's being done about it, because actually what's, what's, weird is, or not weird, but what's interesting is that the actual purpose of the study was, was actually to see, if.
The, the plant-based diet, you know, was, would sort of stand up against the meat-based diet, you know, if they were comparable. And it wasn't really to just specifically look for deficiencies. That's, that was like a sort of side effect of it.
And it was when they, some of the newspapers reported on it, they kind of had that little bit about the deficiencies in the small print. So, no, it wasn't really. Mentioned.
But there isn't really, there isn't guidelines at the moment. There aren't guidelines by either FedDF, or UK Pet Food on how often a manufacturer should test their food for nutrients. So what happens is that when foods are formulated, it's done using formulation software.
And you need to have a really good Good platform for doing that, but you also really need to know your raw materials really, really well, and obviously update the information that's coming in on those raw materials, so you know your different seasons, they're gonna have different nutrient levels, different batches, and if you're on top of that, then your theoretical data, which is your computer when it's saying it's gonna have this much protein, this much magnesium, this much vitamin A, is gonna match. What it is when you test it, if you've got a poor handle on all of that, and then you send it away for testing, then it could be deficient in things. So, there's no recommended testing regime, but I do believe UK Pet Food are looking into that to give, like a sort of general recommendation, to, to guide manufacturers with that.
Mhm. There've been a couple of comments about the, the raw diets and research and that sort of thing. And the question has been asked, is there enough money, and or interest in doing this research?
Are the the people that are selling it, is there any pressure on them to prove what they're claiming? You know, I mean, the, you guys and and Sean, you and I go back many years. I know the great work that Tails does in all their research and Fiona's touched on it now as well.
But is there any, any sort of pressure or or any will or want from that side to actually prove that their claims are true? I think internally within the kind of raw feeding community and certainly raw food brands, they want themselves to get the studies that prove that some of the claims they're making that don't hold up in terms of evidence or don't currently have solid robust evidence to prove them. You know, I saw I'm being targeted and with ads on social media at the moment for a specific brand and .
You know, they have a vet nurse saying, there's now so much scientific evidence about all the benefits we have for raw feeding, and it's like, There's not like that. There's not this mountain of of papers that categorically prove a lot of the claims that are made around it. I think, you know, some are investing in it, but you can't just wish for the evidence to be there or say, we're going another there was another ad similar ad that said like, hopefully research and time is going to prove this.
That's not proof either. You know, we all, we all hope proof and, you know, evidence in time or research and time is going to prove what we want to be true, but you can't use that as a marketing claim, you know, so yeah, it's unfortunately, there is no compelling evidence to say that. Feeding our pets a raw food has, you know, huge benefits over feeding them the exact same food cooked, for example.
Oh, and one thing I didn't give, again, it's another bit of just helpful supportive advice. I, I'm totally with Fiona on this. Like we can ostracise our clients and turn them against us or turn them away from good advice if we don't listen to them and meet them where they're at in terms of food choice.
One thing I would say, another practical tip, so the first one obviously was, if they're going to do it, go with a commercial supplier that's kind of on the UK Pet Food members list because there's a level of standards there. The second thing I would say is YOPI. Young, old, pregnant or immunocompromised people in that family home.
I would probably warn people against raw feeding in those homes with those kind of people because we do see, you know, faecal transmission and fomite transmission of pathogenic microorganisms around the home environment, from dogs or cats to humans and and back again. So there have been very high profile cases. So I think the high risk, patient groups, if you are considering raw feeding.
I would maybe have a word for our role in public health to say, look, fine to raw feed if that's what you want to do, but if you do have anyone in your home that is compromised immune system, maybe it's not the safest choice. Maybe consider a fresh cooked food instead, you know. Yeah, yuppies are OK, but yuppies are not.
No, yeah, yuppie yo. Folks, we have run out of time. I know that, Sean and Fiona are very passionate about that, and we could go on for many, many hours, and there's lots and lots of comments coming in.
But it is left to me now to thank both Fiona and Sean for their time and their expertise tonight. As well as to Tails.com for their generous sponsorship.
Always lovely to listen to you and, to, to hopefully get some enlightenment, by reading those references. So thank you, Fiona. Thank you, Sean.
Thanks, Bruce. Thank you. To all of you that attended tonight, I hope you have enjoyed it, and, I hope at least it stimulated you to think about what Sean and Fiona are talking about.
Go and check out those references, maybe print a few of them out, hand them to your clients that they can be a little bit better educated. And, obviously, we do appreciate your attendance here at the webinar, vet. To Becca, my controller in the background for making everything run smoothly.
Thank you as always. And from myself, Bruce Stevenson, it's good night.
