EXPERTS DO NOT CREATE THE BEST PET FOOD

One would think that after eight years of college, veterinarians would be expert nutritionists.

However, the most profound thing graduates walk away with is: Feed a name brand complete and balanced food, not a generic, and don't imbalance the foods by feeding table scraps.

This wisdom came from what they learned from brochures provided to veterinary schools by the pet food companies. The nutrition taught in veterinary schools, and nutrition schools as well, is not a product of critical thought, but rather results from manufacturers (with the deepest pockets) providing free products for the veterinary schools, along with marketing materials. Pet food companies are no dummies. Brainwashing veterinary neophytes is highly effective and will more than pay for itself when graduates move into practice and recommend all they have come to know.

Medical schools treat nutrition like a soft science, a branch of homemaking so to speak. Students and professors are much more enthralled by dissections, microscopes, surgery, syringes, and x-ray machines.

Besides, all those "name brand" pet food companies have all the details figured out. All that pets needed to do was eat their "100% complete and balanced" foods and nutrition could be put out of consideration as a factor in health.

Most other pet professionals - pet store clerks, breeders, groomers, boarders, etc.- know even less, since no formal scientific training at all is required of them. But pet owners need to rely on the advice of someone, so they go to those who say they are experts to find the best pet food. These "experts" don't purposely try to mislead the public. What they have to say is just all they have bothered to know.

A veterinarian has an excellent background in the sciences to use as a base to gain some true nutritional understanding. A few do this, but not many. If you find one, pay attention. Pet professionals, unless educated well in the sciences, have a more difficult task and are more easily bamboozled by pet food technomarketing or popular lore. Their lack of scientific depth also makes them vulnerable to reducing pet health and the best pet food to simplistic myths such as the benefits of a certain ingredient or the horrors of another. Usually they happen to be selling the brand that has the special ingredient and is without the horrible one.

So there is no easy way for consumers to determine the best pet food. Trusting those who put themselves forth as an expert is not reliable. For you to even know what is or is not good advice, you must engage your mind, learn , and put truth first.

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Thought for the day: Blending truth with the venom of unreason is, and always has been, the cliff over which mankind insists on jumping.

Word of the day: satiety - noun: the feeling of fullness and satisfaction following a meal. Unfortunately we are wired for feast and famine, i.e., when there is food we tend to gorge in anticipation of a famine. But there is never a famine for us today. Our brains got us into this predicament of food-a-plenty; they are what we must use to push away from the table when we BEGIN to experience satiety at a meal. That push away from the table needs to be a part of our daily workout...and it is the hardest exercise there is.