Natural Nutrition Notes

Chemical contamination of our foods is an increasing problem & is becoming a major factor in chronic disease particularly in animals. The process starts with the herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides used to grow crops. Today, we are using pesticides at a rate 13,000 times greater than we did in 1962. Antibiotics, growth stimulants, hormones, tranquilizers, and other drugs are also fed to livestock consuming grains, The EPA has been allowing the recycling of industry waste-material loaded with heavy metals-into commercial fertilizers. In the soil, plants take them up into their tissues where they remain for the life of the plant. When an animal consumes this plant, metals enter the animal’s body and collect there. The more plant that is eaten, the more heavy metal collects in the tissues. If that animal is eaten by another on the food chain, the additional accumulation is more concentrated and is passed on. The problem for carnivores is that the buck stops with them.  Note: Average chemical pollution of breast milk in American women  that consume meat, compared to that of  American women who are complete vegetarians is 35 times higher.

In sampling of canned pet food, it was revealed that lead contamination levels ranging from 0.9 to 7.0 parts per million (ppm) in cat food and 1.0 to 5.6 ppm in dog food. Daily intake of only six ounces of such food would exceed the dose of lead considered potentially toxic for children. Most of the contamination comes from the bone meal, otherwise an excellent source of calcium and other minerals, the American cattle contain high levels of lead, owing to our prolonged usage of leaded gasoline over several decades. Safe bone meal today originates from South America, Ethiopia & other countries with fewer automobiles. Signs of lead poisoning come on gradually and can exhibit as a type of anemia while some animals exhibit other signs of the contamination and can be hyperactive, have seizures, become hysterical, go blind, have stomach cramps and diarrhea, constipation or develop thickened and itchy skin and not all these symptoms occur…sometimes there may be just one. Who would believe one animal can present with clinical signs of anemia and another with seizures? Who would have guessed both could be victims of the same thing?

The major problem of chemical contamination to our food sources is compounded by the fact that in 1989, some 70,000 different chemical were in use by our society with nearly 3,000 new chemicals being introduced annually since. As of 1990, only about 3 percent of all these chemicals have been tested for their ability to cause cancer. The interaction between different chemicals in the same body tissue  can result in different outcomes. They can ‘ignore’ one another having no interaction, one can act on the other causing it to become a completely different chemical possibly more toxic or they can work on one another causing each to have increased effects. While scientific communities can tell us that one particular chemical may not be harmful at certain levels, they have no idea how it will interact with other contaminants in the same body.

 As of late, raw meat diets have come forward as the ideal way to feed our pets, but for the inactive pet, this diet can be very rich in addition to being high in chemical contamination with the exception being if the meat is from an organic source. While animals being fed on this diet have improved health, much of that is related to the fact that the depleted ingredients found in the commercially prepared diets are far inferior. However there is still chemical contamination to be found in that meat only diet. Another example of chemicals in the food animal is DES, a female hormone used to fatten cattle, which is carried into the meat and thus into your dog, gradually having effects over time. This estrogen will not only fatten the cattle fed with it, but your animal in time and estrogen has been proven to cause cancer development. Bone meal for human consumption and sold in natural food stores cannot come from US cattle cue to the lead deposits found in their bone however, animal food manufacturers can and do use bone meal taken from our US cattle.

Using a combination of meat, vegetables and grains, human grade sources wherever possible, presents the alternative to this all meat protein diet. The combination of meat with the grains and veggies provides a higher protein level comparable with (most of the time exceeding) the protein levels found in commercial food.

As to meats in the diets, we must be reminded of the ‘mad cow disease’ that has hit the news time and again. It might be interesting to learn that a study done in 1992 of 444 dogs in England of dogs showing symptoms suggestive of this disease were found to have the disease themselves as ‘scrapie’-associated fibrils (the name for the mad cow disease found in sheep) were identified in the brains of these dogs. Strangely enough, the animals normally thought to exist on grass and plants, are actually being fed tissue from their own kind as an additional feed source in order to reduce costs & find a way to use rendered animal parts. In the New York Times in 2004, an article pointed out that our calves are fed blood instead of milk and cattle feed containing composted wastes from chicken coops including feathers, spilled feed and even feces have been fed for years as a common practice in this country. As quoted in the article rendered animal products go 43% to poultry, 23% to pet food, 13% to swine, 10% to cattle and 11% to other uses such as food for farmed fish. In Europe, 25% of the cattle are tested for ‘mad cow disease’, Japan tests 100% and the US only tests 5 or 6 per million head of cattle.