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The House of Two Bows 雙寶之屋

~ a basenji, a shiba, and their human companions

The House of Two Bows 雙寶之屋

Tag Archives: grandma lucy’s

Hitting a RAW nerve

13 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by M.C. in Digging in the Libraries, Food, drugs & other ingestibles, Links, Observations & opinions

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

bad journalism, bravo pet food, dehydrated dog food, dog food, dogswell, freeze-dried raw, grandma lucy's, honest kitchen, minneapolis, nutrisca, primal raw, raw diet, salmonella, sojos, st. paul, stella and chewy's, twin cities, veterinary nutrition

On the Shiba Inu Forum, Nicole/Saya pointed out a recent news story on commercial raw dog food. Coming out of WCCO in Minneapolis, Jamie Yuccas reports on “Pros & Cons To The Raw Pet Food Diet: Is It Worth It?” Interviewed were Liz Cummiskey of a Twin Cities-based holistic pet food store, Woody’s Pet Food Deli, Dr. Julie Churchill from the department of Veterinary Clinical Nutrition at the University of Minnesota, and a pug owner rather condescendingly described as a “believer” of raw diets. Crudely polarizing the salespeople against the scientists, the report basically gave Dr. Churchill the last word, coming down against raw diets by ridiculing the costs, hyping potential risks, and dismissing anecdotal claims made by proponents.

Now, I understand that personal observations only go so far, and there are very compelling reasons for many pet owners to not feed raw. However, it drives me batty when journalists fall back on any type of authority without properly contextualizing what is presented as fact, just focusing on who says what they want to use as news. This is true in any venue in which “expert” testimony is solicited, but even more frustrating when it comes to scientific reporting in mainstream media — precisely because I’m not a scientist and need others to filter information for me in an accountable manner.

This is exactly what we expect journalists to do, so it’s maddening when the task is carried out so sloppily. Take, for example, the presentation of this “factoid” from the news report:

In a recent University of Minnesota study, the department looked at 60 raw meat diets available at stores in the Twin Cities. Seven percent of them tested positive for salmonella.

All sorts of alarms clang when I read statistics framed in such a vague context. First of all, the University of Minnesota is a large research university with many departments — which department conducted the study? What is the title of the report? Where was it published? Who funded it? How did they select the samples for testing? What brands? How did they handle the samples? Did they bother trying to trace the source of the contamination, or is the mere presence of Salmonella meant to be damning in and of itself?

Bowpi looking cute and round-eyed for dinner

Curious about details, I looked up the study. Not too hard to find, though it would have been nice if the report had been cited to begin with.

  • Mehlenbacher, Shelley, Julie Churchill, et. al, “Availability, Brands, Labelling and Salmonella Contamination of Raw Pet Food in the Minneapolis/St. Paul Area,” Zoonoses Public Health 59.7 (November 2012):513-20.
    Abstract at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22551080

The study looked at 60 different types of raw dog food from eleven different unnamed brands, including frozen, dehydrated, and freeze-dried varieties. Five unnamed kibble brands were tested as well. Though the samples were anonymized, a table was included comparing the first five ingredients, so it’s not too difficult to figure out that they appear to have sampled all the major, nationally-available brands, and probably some regional ones that I’m not familiar with.

The way that the study is being used to foment paranoia about raw dog food is problematic to me. Here are a couple details that I find interesting enough to highlight:

    “The 2010 Food Safety and Inspection Service progress report on Salmonella testing of raw meat and poultry products sold in retail stores indicated the Salmonella prevalence was 18.8% in ground chicken, 10.2% in ground turkey, 6.7% in broiler chickens, 4.6% in turkeys, 2.4% in market hogs and 2.2% in ground beef (United States Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service, 2010). A 2009 Consumer Reports study indicated that the prevalence of Salmonella contamination between store-bought organic and non-organic brands was similar and ranged from 6% to 29% (Consumer Reports, 2010).” (p. 514)

In other words, by their own review of findings, the presence of Salmonella in 7% (four out of 60 samples) of commercially available raw dog foods falls within the low end of the TYPICAL amount of Salmonella found in grocery store meat fed for human consumption. If this information is remarkable at all, it should be pointed out that this is actually on the low side of the spectrum, especially given the conditions under which the meat was prepped for this study.

See, here’s the funniest segment to me (because I always go to public health journals for light comedy…):

    “Products were purchased, placed in a cooler and transported to the University of Minnesota and stored according to package instructions until processed. For [lab] processing, frozen diets were thawed at room temperature in original packaging for 12–16 h.” (p. 515, emphasis mine)

Wait, what? This was allowed to pass as appropriate procedure? You know, a long time ago, I worked at a food safety testing laboratory… No doubt the lab’s clients, which included several national restaurant chains, would have terminated their contracts and charged us with rigging the results if we had thawed their frozen hamburger patties by this protocol!

Now, I understand that the study is geared in part towards their final recommendation that proper handling guidelines need to be added to raw pet food packages. But honestly, that information is just as accessible as how to handle raw meat for human consumption. Is a consumer safety sticker saying “HEY! RAW MEAT IS RAW!” really going to protect the clueless??

When I thaw frozen meat for myself or for the dogs, I know to do it overnight in the refrigerator, or not more than a couple hours at room temperature and ideally submerged in cold water. Perhaps I am being too generous in assuming this is basic information that any cook already knows. It seems, however, that this study was designed by someone playing dumb in order to promote the growth of all sorts of icky germs…

Thus, it’s no surprise to me that the four samples that DID test positive for Salmonella were indeed frozen raw products, which were thawed out using the process described above. “It was interesting to note,” the report reads, “that Salmonella was not recovered from the processed samples, perhaps warranting further research into the use of processing methods such as HPP or freeze-drying for the prevention of bacterial contamination” (p. 518). Let me put it another way: it’s interesting to note just how safe raw dog food may actually be if properly handled in the first place, because the way I see it, the problem isn’t with the diet itself, but the way the researchers prepped it for the purposes of conforming to their own agenda.

A note to future veterinary nutritionists designing and writing up these types of studies: You might do better negotiating the “belief structures surrounding this practice” (p. 514) of raw feeding if you started by acknowledging the existence of your own. When experiments seem designed, for example, to suggest that raw feeders are idiots, it’s no wonder they provoke an irate, defensive response…

Bowdu's dinner

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Two meatless, dehydrated mixes: Grandma Lucy’s Artisan Pre-mix and Honest Kitchen Preference

12 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by M.C. in Bowdu the shiba inu, Bowpi the basenji, Food, drugs & other ingestibles, Reviews

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

artisan foods, dehydrated dog food, dog food, grandma lucy's, honest kitchen, raw diet, raw turkey

Recently, we tested out a couple dehydrated meatless pre-mixes that I got as free samples from a local pet boutique. I hadn’t been very interested in this stuff in the past, as frankly, it seemed economically silly to pay for this insta-food when you’re adding your own meat — the actual meal. It’s sort of like springing for soup and stew flavoring powder mixes, when it’s really not that hard to shake your own blend of spices into a pot of meat and water.

But the idea of these pre-mixes is to offer a means to balance a meal with high quality ingredients (more nutritionally dense than canned or kibble), yet still easy to prepare and customize. Feeding the Bows just the raw ground turkey that I had stockpiled in previous months wouldn’t be enough. So blending it with these formulas would help round out and add some variety to their diet.

We tried these two brands —

Grandma Lucy's Artisan Pre-mix

Grandma Lucy’s Artisan Pre-mix (2 oz. trial size)

Ingredients: Potatoes, flax, sweet potatoes, carrots, celery, apples, bananas, blueberries, cranberries, garlic, rosemary, Vitamin A, Vitamin D3, Vitamin E, Niacin, iron, calcium, phosphorus, zinc, riboflavin, thiamin, potassium, manganese, chloride, copper, magnesium, pyridoxine, cyanocobalamin

Guaranteed analysis:

  • Crude protein, min. 13.5%
  • Crude fat, min. 9%
  • Crude fiber, max. 9%
  • Moisture, max. 10%
  • Calcium, min. 1%
  • Phosphorus, min. 0.37%
  • Magnesium, max 0.16%

Honest Kitchen Preference

Honest Kitchen Preference (1 oz. trial size, says it makes about 1/4 cup of food)

Ingredients: Dehydrated sweet potatoes, organic alfalfa, cabbage, organic coconut, apples, spinach, zucchini, bananas, celery, organic kelp, honey, tricalcium phosphate, choline chloride, zinc amino acid chelate, vitamin D3 supplement, vitamin E supplement, potassium iodide, potassium chloride, iron amino acid chelate, copper amino acid chelate.

Guaranteed analysis:

  • Protein, min 12%
  • Fat, min 6%
  • Fiber, 10% max
  • Moisture, 10% max
  • Calcium, 1.67% [dry matter basis], 0.76% hydrated*
  • Phosphorus, 0.71% [dry matter basis], 0.33% hydrated*
  • Magnesium, 0.24% [dry matter basis], 0.11% hydrated*

* not on package, information from the Honest Kitchen’s nutrient profiles.

Both were prepared the same way — rehydrated and mixed with ground turkey, served at dinner time.

Grandma Lucy's Artisan Pre-mix
Grandma Lucy’s Artisan Pre-mix

vs.

Honest Kitchen Preference + raw turkey
Honest Kitchen Preference

Both were very easy to rehydrate, with instructions claiming that five minutes is all it takes. I found this certainly to be true for Grandma Lucy’s, as everything reconstituted almost immediately into a thick, mashed potatoey goo. It smelled great, and I sampled a bit and found it to be quite a smooth blend.

Grandma Lucy's Artisan Pre-mix
Grandma Lucy’s, sans meat

Grandma Lucy's + raw turkey
Grandma Lucy’s, with raw ground turkey

However, I usually find that it’s better to rehydrate Honest Kitchen for longer than their recommended time, and Preference was no exception. The mix was still fairly rough after soaking for five minutes (yes, I sampled this one too), so I let it sit for about fifteen minutes. Not a huge time difference to me, though every minute just ramped up the anticipation for the Bows.

Bowdu sits nicely for his Honest KitchenBowpi does not sit nicely for her Honest Kitchen
One of these Bows sits politely for his Honest Kitchen; the other one is too eager to keep her butt planted!

If you visit Grandma Lucy’s very flashy Artisan site, there’s a fabulous chart comparing their products to other dehydrated and raw foods currently on the market, including Honest Kitchen, Sojos (which we were offered but bypassed, given the memory of our food failure with this brand), Stella & Chewy’s, and ZiwiPeak (which do not offer meatless pre-mixes). By their calculations —

  • 3 pounds of Artisan Pre-mix selling for a MSRP of $19.60 would make 17 pounds of food, averaging $1.15/meal for a 30 pound dog.
  • 3 pounds of HK Preference selling for a MSRP of $27.50 would make 12 pounds of food, averaging $1.15/meal for a 30 pound dog.

I’m a little confused by the feeding guidelines. Artisan recommends using 1.5 ~ 2 cups of dry mix for an “average” 20 ~ 30 pound dog (that’s what it says on the package, though it says the same thing for their complete formulas). For dogs up to 30 pounds, HK recommends 1/3rd ~ 1/2 cup of dry mix with enough meat to round it out to approximately 1 cup of food total, with a higher meat-to-Preference ratio for more active dogs. So it seems like each company has different expectations for how much a dog is supposed to eat in a day. At any rate, the Bows fall somewhere on the lower side of both suggested ranges; you should adjust accordingly.

The price per meal also seems to be calculated according to a single-feeding day (we feed two meals a day). Price-wise, these two brands are evenly matched. Both brands come out at nearly the same Kcal/cup (HK: 398; GL: 399), so even though the Artisan Pre-mix ultimately makes more food, you are expected to mix in less HK Preference to balance out a meal.

In terms of ingredients, my human nose found the Artisan Pre-mix to smell more appetizing than HK, but I think I was drawn to the combined aroma of potatoes and garlic. Some people prefer to leave garlic out of dog food. The Bows have never had a problem with garlic in small amounts, so I personally have no problem with seeing it in the formula.

However, we much rather prefer sweet potatoes, the leading ingredient for HK Preference. Though it’s the first item on the list, this blend appears very green and vegetation-dense. Like Grandma Lucy’s, all HK foods are manufactured in the United States, and sourced domestically whenever possible. In the final lap, the Honest Kitchen pulls slightly ahead because they use higher quality ingredients, and the company maintains a level of transparency, accountability, and customer responsiveness that we have found to be unmatched.

Since this was just a brief sample and not an extended trial, no letter grade is assigned to this review. We liked and would happily try both products again.

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