Study: Pet food labeling needs more transparency

A new study published in Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica, the official journal of the Veterinary Associations of the Nordic Countries, has found that many pet food brands contain unspecified animal parts that are not listed on labels.
The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Nottingham, examined 17 popular wet pet foods for dogs and cats in the UK. Researchers said they examined the presence and authenticity of animal sources of proteins in pet food in the wake of the 2013 horse meat scandal in the human food chain.
The pet foods were sampled for the relative presence of DNA from bovine, porcine, chicken and horse sources. In the samples, no horse DNA was detected, but there were substantial levels of unspecified animal species in most products tested. The study found that 14 of those brands contained cow, chicken and pig DNA, but none of those animals were listed on the label. Of the seven brands with prominent descriptions containing the term “with beef,” only two were found to contain more bovine DNA than porcine and chicken DNA combined.
 Researchers concluded that there is a need for the pet food industry to be more transparent with consumers in the disclosure of the types of animal proteins in their products. They said full disclosure will allow consumers to make more informed choices on purchases that are particularly important for pets with food allergies, reduce the risk of product misinterpretation, and avoid potential religious concerns.

South Dakota State University to study Salmonella testing in raw petfood

Through a five-year US Food and Drug Administration grant for nearly $500,000, South Dakota State University Senior Microbiologist Seema Das aims to determine whether a test that detects Salmonella in human food can do the same in raw petfood.

test
The first year the test will be validated, and then either adjustments or expansion of the testing will be done in subsequent years. The work will involve multi-lab validation with collaborators at Iowa State, Texas A & M, the University of Minnesota and the New Jersey Department of Agriculture. "This is not only a pet health issue, it is a human health issue because everything is interlinked," said Das. "If the petfood is contaminated with Salmonella, it goes from the petfood to you."  
After reviewing recalls, Das and her research team suspect that mice or other rodents may be possible sources of contamination. Rodents and bugs can be problematic in factories where food is produced, said Das, and Salmonella is a common pathogen in mice. The SDSU team, consisting of veterinarian Russ Daly, bacteriologist Laura Ruesch, microbiologists Marciel Aguiar and Cindy Watt and two undergraduate students, began working on the project in September 2013.

Higher-fat, lower-protein diet may aid dogs' smelling skills

Dogs' smelling skills may be improved by cutting protein and adding fats into the diet, according to new research.
A higher-fat, lower-protein petfood diet helps dogs return to lower body temperatures after exercise, which reduces panting and improves sniffing, researchers from Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine and Auburn University found. 
The US Department of Justice-funded study found that detection dogs are actually more reliable than was previously thought. The study was conducted in an Alabama, USA, detection dog research facility designed in conjunction with a military dog trainer. The facility provides expert detection dogs to police and military forces.
During the study, fumes in the facility were flushed out each time between tests to ensure a fresh detection field each time. "Previous studies from other facilities, which lack this feature, had suggested detection dogs signaling for suspect substances are about 70 percent accurate," said Joseph Wakshlag, associate professor of clinical studies and chief of nutrition at Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine. "The lower numbers may have been due to study design flaws which our new study overcame. Dogs tested in the new facility signaled with 90 percent and above accuracy. We also found we can push detection performance even further with the right kind of food."
The study rotated 17 trained dogs over an 18-month period through three petfood diets: high-end performance diet, regular adult dog food and regular adult dog food diluted with corn oil. The high-performance and corn-oil diets were designed to have the same amount of energy from fat (57 percent), but the corn oil diet had less protein, with 18 percent compared to the 27 percent in regular and high-performance diets. Researchers then gauged how the different diets affected the different dogs. They found that dogs that ate the normal diet diluted with corn oil returned to normal body temperatures quickest after exercise and were better at detecting smokeless powder, ammonia nitrate and TNT.
According to Wakshlag: "Corn oil has lots of polyunsaturated fats, similar to what you'd find in a lot of nuts and common grocery store seed oils. Past data from elsewhere suggest that these polyunsaturated fats might enhance the sense of smell, and it looks like that may be true for detection dogs. It could be that fat somehow improves nose-signaling structures or reduces body temperature or both. But lowering protein also played a part in improving olfaction.
"If you're a dog, digesting protein raises body temperature, so the longer your body temperature is up, the longer you keep panting, and the harder it is to smell well. Our study shifts the paradigm of what 'high-performance' diet can mean for dogs. It depends on what you want your dog to do. A sled dog or greyhound may need more protein to keep going. But detection dogs tend to exercise in shorter bursts and need to recover quickly and smell well. For that, less protein and more fat could help," said Wakshlag.

Extru-Tech completes first petfood extrusion safety validation study in killing Salmonella

Extru-Tech recently completed an industry-first scientific validation study proving the kill/lethality step of the extrusion process in its Level 2 Bio-Safety Extrusion lab in Manhattan, Kansas, USA. Extru-Tech’s scientific validation proved the petfood extrusion system as an effective control against Salmonella.
Extru-Tech analyzed key operational parameters to consider when scientifically validating a typical extruded petfood process:
• Equipment scale – Production rates
• Equipment configuration – Barrel screw stack-up, preconditioner paddle configuration
• Formulation
• Product specification
Extru-Tech then reviewed the possible paths for validation of a typical petfood process in order of preference and viability:
• Pilot plant – Most accepted and least risk
• In-plant surrogate
• In-plant pathogenic
• Laboratory validation
• Scientific Literature – Least accepted and most risk
“Extru-tech is using actual equipment that you would find in most petfood plants in a bio-hazard laboratory or a pilot plant,” said Jim Marsden, PhD, regents distinguished professor at Kansas State University. “Raw materials can be inoculated with Salmonella or other pathogens and the effect of the extrusion process can be exactly quantified. This process is a breakthrough for the petfood industry.”
Based on the design criteria, a BSL-2 pilot plant was outfitted with an E525 production-scale extruder system and the equipment was configured for the production of an industry-generic, low-moisture, dry-expanded petfood. The E325s typically used produce 200 to 600 pounds of petfood per hour, whereas the E525 chosen can produce nearly 8,000 pounds per hour (in terms of typical petfood). The industry-generic petfood formula selected was charged with a 3 serotype cocktail of Salmonella, an inoculant that represents typical contamination events in the manufacturing process.
All three replications of the challenge study resulted in a log reduction of Salmonella that exceeded the 5-log reduction requirement of a CCP allocation. Extru-Tech also discovered that many readily available and scientific methods of inoculation rendered a result that was not truly representative of a contamination event because of the method by which the raw material was inoculated.
“Extru-tech is documenting the parameters that are required to deactivate Salmonella in the extrusion process,” said Dr. Marsden. “There are other production steps that follow where Salmonella could recontaminate the product. Extru-tech is looking at those additional steps to identify interventions that could be applied downstream to prevent recontamination.”

Low-fat pet food may benefit dogs with gastrointestinal disease

Low-fat pet foods may provide health benefits to dogs with gastrointestinal disease, according to Dr. Jorg Steiner, associate professor in the Department of Small Animal Medicine and Surgery at Texas A&M University. 
Lipids, water-insoluble molecules, have many crucial functions in dogs, specifically triglycerides and cholesterol. Dr. Steiner says that hypertriglyceridemia is common in dogs, but affects some breeds more than others, as some recent studies have indicated. In the study, 611 routine chemistry profiles in dogs were performed at a veterinary laboratory in Italy and evaluated; findings showed that 33 dogs (5.4 percent) showed hypertriglyceridemia. 
Another study tested 192 healthy miniature Schnauzers, finding that 63 (32.8 percent) had hypertriglyceridemia. According to Dr. Steiner, differentiating between primary or secondary hypertriglyceridemia can be difficult, but is based on exclusion of suspected risk factors of secondary  hypertriglyceridemia, such as diabetes mellitus, obesity or pancreatitis, while primary hypertriglyceridemia is often associated with a higher breed-related frequency. 
Dr. Steiner says the most important consequence of hypertriglyceridemia in dogs is pancreatitis, as supported by a study which found the risk of pancreatitis was nearly five times higher in miniature Schnauzers with severe hypertriglyceridemia (above 10,17 mmol/l or 900 mg/dl) than in the study's control dogs. Generally, treatment of hypertriglyceridemia is recommended when serum triglyceride concentrations are above 5.65 mmol/l (500 mg/dl), though there is little scientific evidence to support this, Dr. Steiner says. 
The primary therapeutic approach for treatment of hypertriglyceridemia in dogs is to feed a pet food diet that is low in fat (generally less than 20 grams of fat/1,000 kcal). A recent study of miniature Schnauzers whose hypertriglyceridemia was managed with a dietary chence to a low-fat pet food found that none of the dogs had serum triglyceride concentrations that were above 500 mg/dl after the dietary change. Additionally, the liboprotein profile of the dogs changed after being switched to the low-fat food to more-closely resemble the liboprotein profile of a healthy dog.
Because the digestion of dietary fat is more complex than that of proteins or carbohydrates, dogs with a wide variety of gastrointestinal problems may show maldigestion or malabsorption of fat. So, Dr. Steiner says, decreasing the fat content in pet food may improve clinical signs in dogs.

Study finds maize gluten feed may be beneficial dog food ingredient

A Brazilian scientist conducted a study using two different techniques to measure digestibility and metabolizable energy of maize gluten feed as an ingredient in pet food for dogs.

MGF, a co-product of wet milling of maize, is composed of the structures left after most starch, gluten and germ has been extracted from the grain. Two different techniques were used to asses the digestibility and energy values of MGF, though both studies used extruded diets fed to Beagle dogs with six replicates per diet.
In the first study, a difference method was used to replace 300 g/kg of a reference diet with MGF. Based on the difference method, the coefficient of total tract apparent digestibility of MGF was 0.53 for dry matter, 0.69 for crude protein, 0.74 for fat, 0.99 for starch and 0.55 for gross energy. As fed in the study, the calculated metabolizable energy of MGF was 7.99 MJ/kg.
A regression method was used for the second study, which used a regular basal diet and a basal diet with 70, 140 and 210 g MGF/kg of diet as a substitute for maize starch. The inclusion of MGF in this diet resulted in a linear reduction of the coefficient of total tract apparent digestibility of 0.99 for dry matter, 0.95 for crude protein, 0.87 for fat, 0.81 for starch and 0.99 for gross energy. Faecal production increased linearly from 56 g to 107 g per dog per day, faecal dry matter showed a linear reduction and faecal lactic acid concentrations increased linearly. Both urine and faeces also showed a linear reduction in pH levels.
Results of the ingredient coefficient of total tract apparent digestibility obtained by each of the two different methods showed a 6% or less variance for crude protein, fat, starch and metabolizable energy content, but the two methods produced different results for the calculated coefficient of total tract apparent digestibility of dry matter and organic matter. The low digestibility of MGF may be explained by its high dietary fiber content, according to the study. The study concluded that MGF may be a useful ingredient in dog food formulations designed to have low energy or reduce urine pH levels of dogs.

Cranimals featured in new book

Certified organic pet supplements Cranimals have been featured in the recently released book 30 Days Without Kibble.
The book, written by Eva Blais, offers dog owners an alternative to buying commercially prepared kibble and canned dog food.
Blais says she chose Cranimals to supplement her whole food recipes because after feeding the supplements to her dogs, she saw an improvement in their skin, coat and dental health, and believes Cranimals has also helped keep her pets’ immune systems strong.