Keep Your Cat Healthy the Natural Way - Couverture souple

Do you know what is in meat meal, the major constituent of dry dog food?... Urine, fecal matter, hair, pus, meat with cancer and T.B., etc."1

--Wendell O. Belfield, D.V.M.

When the moist foods came out, we figured they must have a very strong preservative, because they need no refrigeration. Many of them do have a very strong preservative--formalin. Formalin is such a good preservative, in fact, that undertakers use quite a lot of it."
--Thomas A. Newland, D.V.M. (in 1981)

When I started out as a veterinarian, I too told everybody. 'Yes, sure, the commercial foods are all fine. Go ahead and use them. Your cat will thrive.' But I was brain dead at the time."
--John Fudens, D.V.M.
How Commercial Pet Foods May Be Killing Your Cat--and Why

If someone suggested you feed your cat rust every day, you would think the person was quite mad, wouldn't you? But maybe you do just that without knowing it. How about feeding her two substances that scientists use in laboratories to create brain defects in animals? How about taking a bottle marked POISON, with a skull and crossbones on its label, and sprinkling that over her food? If you feed your cat packaged or canned "nutritionally complete" pet foods--as so very many people in this country do--you may be giving her not only all of the above poisons but a number of others. This information may surprise you, because commercial food manufacturers--and even many veterinarians--tell us these foods are the "best" way to feed our pets. However, read on and see what researchers and nutritional veterinarians have to say.
What Is In Commercial Pet Food That Shouldn't Be?

To begin with, let us look at what commercial pet foods are composed of in general. In 1975 the Pet Food Institute said: "Forty percent of all pet food is meat by-products and offal [wastes]." One would think that the other 60 percent would have to be better than that, but the Pet Food Institute goes on to say that the other 60 percent is grain and soy meal not used for human consumption because of foreign odors, debris, germs, and so on.2 You may remember the similar, even stronger statement by Wendell O. Belfield, D.V.M., on the first page of this chapter.

As we will discuss, today some nutritional veterinarians believe commercial foods are worse than ever.

By the way, you may have noted that Dr. Belfield wrote of tumors being put in our pets' foods. More recently I read a vivid example of that fact. A veterinarian visiting a meatpacking plant asked why the tumors being cut out from the dead animals were stored in bins, rather than thrown away. She was told there was nothing to worry about. The tumors would never reach human consumption; they would all be used in cat and dog foods.

Commercial pet foods contain a number of other "extra" substances, substances not present in natural foods and therefore foreign (toxic) to your pet's body. For instance:
Sodium nitrite. You have probably heard that sodium nitrite, which occurs in such processed foods as hot dogs and bologna, can cause cancer in human beings. But did you know that as long ago as 1972 the FDA stated that this chemical is also potentially hazardous to pet health?3 That hasn't stopped commercial manufacturers from using it, however. You see, sodium nitrite is terribly important: It adds an artificial rosy color to some commercial pet foods. Manufacturers know that this makes a good impression on us; and we, after all, are the ones who shell out the money for these products. It is doubtful, however, that this pleasant red color makes much difference to your cat. Cats cannot see colors.

Sodium nitrite isn't the only unnatural ingredient used  in commercial foods to add pretty colors for the enjoyment of cats who can't see them. You may see mention on the label of red dye #2, blue dye #3, yellow dye some other number. A popular commercial cat food, which features on the box a picture of very colorful kibble, is honest enough to list several dyes as among the ingredients. But, as mentioned elsewhere in this chapter, if dyes aren't listed as ingredients, that is no assurance they aren't in your cat's commercial food.

BHA and BHT. Scientists use these chemicals on animals in research laboratories--to produce serious brain defects. These additives also produce kidney and liver problems as well as behavior problems in laboratory animals.

Lead. Researching this new book, I found indications that lead is not so prevalent in canned cat foods as it was in 1981. At that time, researchers at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station had found that many canned foods contained so much lead that every time an animal ate six ounces of these foods he took into his body four times the level of lead potentially toxic to children. So, even if this terrible state of affairs has improved, we might ask why this amount of lead was ever allowed in the first place--and what else is presently being allowed that we don't know about.

John Fudens, D.V.M., comments that "you might still find lead in some of those canned cat foods you can buy for about a dime. But I wouldn't feed those to a cockroach."

Artificial flavorings. These are used to make fake food taste the way it would if it were real food. About 25 years ago a California physician, Benjamin Feingold, of the Kaiser Permanente Hospital, came out with a radical theory that put his reputation on the line: Many children with autism, hyperactivity, and various other personality disorders could be controlled simply by removing artificial colorings and flavorings from their diets. His theory worked so well in practice that it has since been utilized even by some of the most orthodox physicians.

Veterinarians practicing the new field of nutritional veterinary medicine have been calling for the removal of such artificial flavorings from pet foods. R. Geoffrey Broderick, D.V.M., once said: "These same substances that are known to cause children to be unsociable, unable to learn--to choose to spend hours at a time sitting and banging their heads against a wall--these are the substances that cause your dog or cat to be nervous, hostile, and full of anxiety."

Salt. This substance, while it does occur in nature, is added in unnatural proportions to many processed foods. Sometimes, Dr. Broderick said in 1981, such foods contain "one thousand times" as much salt as occurs in the natural food the processed food is imitating. You probably know the strong role excessive salt plays in causing human hypertension and heart disease. It does the same thing in cats and is considered one of the main reasons these two diseases, virtually unknown in our pets until fifty years ago, are now top killers.

Ethoxyquin. The first questionnaire response I received for this new book came from a veterinarian who referred to himself as basically orthodox. He wrote that he had been using my first book to start to incorporate holistic medicine into his practice but doubted he knew enough yet to contribute to this edition. The one comment he did give, however, was that he felt I would find that commercial food manufacturers had "cleaned up their acts" since the first edition. Following a long tradition of veterinarians who don't specialize in nutrition, this doctor now believed that commercial foods would maintain animals' health. (Hoping, for the sake of all animals, that this doctor was right in his belief that some toxic substances had been removed, I skulked in my neighborhood reading labels, as I had done in 1981 for the first edition. No, everything I had mentioned before was still listed on labels. And it was only later that I found out, as I'll detail shortly, that a new law allows pet food manufacturers to
put toxic substances into the foods without mentioning them on the label.)

(Not all pet foods contain all the following harmful substances. Note also that this list does not comprise all the harmful substances that occur in various commercial pet foods.)
To double-check myself, I asked Dr. Fudens if he thought commercial foods had got any better in the years since the first book. "You're kidding me," he said. "In my opinion and experience, commercial pet foods have recently got much worse than they've ever been, with the road kill and the diseased carcasses, and everything else they're putting in there."

I took the same question up with Carvel G. Tiekert, D.V.M., founder and president of the American Holistic Veterinary Medical Association. He pointed out that there had been a brand-new poison, ethoxyquin, introduced into many pet foods since the first edition, and he sent me an article by Gloria Dodd, D.V.M., from the Journal of the American Holistic Veterinary Medical Association (August-October 1992). You may remember I said at the beginning of this chapter that you might very well unknowingly be feeding your cat every day from a bottle with a label featuring, in all capital letters, POISON, with an additional skull and crossbones as a warning for those who don't read English. I was talking about ethoxyquin.

The article was actually a letter written by Dr. Dodd to a veterinary nutritionist responsible for pet food issues within the Food and Drug Administration. Previous to her letter, Dr. Dodd had run four years of research on ethoxyquin. She began this work when a breeder contacted her after suddenly losing four champion German shepherds in a row to liver cancer. The breeder had made only one change in rearing her dogs: She'd switched them to a new commercial food that had ethoxyquin as a preservative. Soon after, another breeder told Dr. Dodd that suddenly 82 percent of her puppies were dying. Many others came into the world dead to begin with, or were malformed. The only thing she'd done differently was to switch to the same pet food.

One of the first facts Dr. Dodd unearthed was that the FDA allows a maximum of 5 ppm of ethoxyquin in human foods--which would seemingly indicate that the FDA knows it can be toxic--but allows up to 150 ppm in pet food. So it's okay for our beloved companions to eat thirty times more of this chemical than it's considered safe for us to take in. That might make some sense if our cats weighed thirty times more than we do, but obviously ...

Maybe by now you've run off to check the commercial foods you give your cat and have noticed with relief that ethoxyquin isn't listed on the labels. Although I have recently seen this chemical mentioned on labels, Dr. Dodd states that many manufacturers who use ethoxyquin in their foods don't mention it. You may say, "I thought there was an FDA regulation that all ingredients had to be mentioned on the label." So did I. So did Dr. Dodd.

Dr. Fudens addressed this issue in an interview with me. "This is what has happened in the last few years. Lobbyists for the pet food companies got a new pet food labeling act passed in Washington," he said. "There are only about five major producing companies, and they contract out their base meal to most of the other companies. These first companies put in their meat and whatever else--and then what goes on their label is only what they've added to the basic ingredients." Dr. Fudens sent me an article indicating that the "whatever else" he refers to as basic ingredients includes spoiled meat cuts, ground-up flea collars and "body bags" that come in with euthanized pets, and other ingredients I'd like to shield you from knowing about. "They're not required anymore to mention on the label any junk, garbage, or poisons that are in the basic ingredients unless they actually added it."

These major producing companies then contract out their base meal to other companies. If the latter companies do not add any more poisons, ground-up flea collars, or whatever, "they can call the food all-natural or anything else they want to call it," the veterinarian says.

"So if an enlightened cat owner tries to buy only commercial foods that say they're all natural, no preservatives, no artificial this or that," Dr. Fudens summarized, "the owner should realize that only God really knows what's in those foods."

In her long, impassioned letter, Dr. Dodd gives many more chilling facts. I'm giving only a few of them. "I further learned from the Chemical Toxicology of Commercial Products," she writes, "that ethoxyquin has a toxic rating of 3 on a scale of 1 to 6." She explains that a rating of 6 means that fewer than seven drops of a substance produces instant death. The rating of 3 given to ethoxyquin means, the veterinarian says, that it can produce slowly developing depression, skin irritation, liver damage, convulsions, coma, and eventual death.

Dr. Dodd states that the FDA approved ethoxyquin on the basis of a study conducted by its developer, Monsanto, over thirty years ago. She gives a number of specifics of what she calls the "slipshod" methods by which the study was conducted, concluding that "by today's standards of testing, [Monsanto's study] would be laughed out of the room."

But wait a minute. Let's look at one of the results Monsanto had. Of the sixty-seven puppies who were born during the study, thirty-two died, a mortality rate of almost 50 percent. You may remember that it was exactly an abnormally high rate of dead puppies that prompted Dr. Dodd's four years of research into ethoxyquin in the first place.

Dr. Dodd says, "The 'scientists' claimed the deaths were due to 'underdeveloped and weak puppies'!" I'm sure you don't need me to suggest to you that maybe those puppies were born that way not because of karma or a fluke of nature but because of ethoxyquin in their mother's diet.

Dr. Dodd, who studied with medical physicians in Europe and in South America, used a state-of-the-art electronic machine developed in Germany to scientifically analyze ethoxyquin's effects in the body. She found the chemical implicated in--and I'm giving only a partial list here--poor quality of skin and hair, weight loss, obesity, nausea, diarrhea, allergies, and numerous internal stress reactions. (Dr. Dodd notes, "There's nothing more stressing to the body than being poisoned!") She also found hypothyroidism, overall accelerated aging of the organs, tumors, and cancer of the liver with metastasis to the pancreas and spleen.

Some animals evinced strange behavior, such as incessant pacing or a "sudden development of a Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde syndrome--quiet, loving pets changed to violently aggressive biting animals." Many of these were so violent that their owners euthanized them.

In those animals whose organs were not irreversibly damaged, Dr. Dodd was able to get a good recovery response in part by using a homeopathic remedy that negates the effects of ethoxyquin.

Euthanized cats and dogs. Am I telling you here that the commercial foods your cat eats may contain ground-up parts of her own "people" who were put to death because they were unloved or were diagnosed as too sick to go on living? Unfortunately, yes, I am. I won't comment any further on this particular fact. I'm sure you can fill in your own thoughts.
What Isn't in Commercial Foods That Should Be?

Advertising for most commercial pet foods states that the products have all the nutrients your cat or dog needs. But do they?

If you were being p...

Healing diets for optimal well-being
Holistic treatments for serious conditions
Acupuncture, homeopathy, and vitamin supplements
Cutting-edge natural therapies

Hundreds of veterinarians keep cats healthy and save critically ill pets through alternative medicine--now you can, too!

Many pet owners are turning to holistic medicine for the long-term health benefits it offers their loyal companions. Keep Your Cat Healthy the Natural Way draws upon the combined experience of the country's best holistic veterinarians and gives us invaluable information on herbology, acupressure, massage, and vitamins and diet for our cats, including

The most nourishing (and least expensive) food for a long and healthy life
Special diets for each stage of your cat's development
Homeopathy, herbals, and other nontoxic, noninvasive treatments
The startling truth about vaccinations, booster shots, and antibiotics
Healing those distinct problems of the eye, skin, and hair
New hope for distemper, diabetes, cancer, and many other conditions
The hard facts on commercial cat food
And much more!

Everything you need to know for giving your cat the makings of a great life is here--including reassuring case histories and a directory of members of the American Holistic Veterinary Medical Association. With this life-giving reference, you will indeed Keep Your Cat Healthy the Natural Way.