Pet Food: Should I feed an all-natural or grain-free diet?

Hardly a week goes by that I don’t hear a pet owner tell me that they have started feeding their pet a much more expensive food with no grain or an all-natural diet or a food with meat (instead of meat byproducts). The obvious question is: Are these the best foods to feed our pets and are they worth what we pay for them?

My opinion (also shared by the professional veterinary nutritionists I have spoken with) is that these foods offer no advantage to more traditional high quality diets, but we may be paying more to simply purchase some advertised ingredients. This post offers my opinion as a veterinarian who has researched and promoted careful dietary management for almost 40 years.

Let’s discuss low-end  pet foods first. Unfortunately, you get what you pay for when it comes to most pet foods. If you pay less, you are most likely getting less. Comparing labels and ingredients simply doesn’t help. To prove this point, years ago a major pet food company cooked down leather boots and then tested the product to come up with the guaranteed nutritional analysis. The results: the nutritional analysis was identical to most of the available canned pet foods, but a pet fed the cooked leather boots would have starved to death because the ingredients were not digestible. Some time ago when a new pet food was introduced by a major company, they wanted their label to have meat listed before meat byproducts (to look better  than a major competing brand). This diet contained less meat than meat byproducts, but by simply playing with the processing, they were able to list meat first. (Besides, quality meat byproducts are not necessarily an undesirable ingredient!)

When you look at the biggest pet food manufacturers such as Royal Canin, Iams-Eukanuba, and Purina, you see huge, multinational companies that can afford extensive research and feeding trials. They employ teams of professionals to formulate and evaluate their diets. These companies study the relationship between diet and disease and invest millions of dollars developing diets formulated to help control or treat many diseases. Often existing diets are reformulated and improved based on the results of these studies.

Yes, you do help pay for these studies, but you also benefit from the fact that these large companies can reduce their costs by buying large quantities of quality ingredients, and they pass this savings on to you. You are spending what is necessary to buy a diet with the very same ingredients that have been proven to keep our pets long-lived and healthy. So, what about the niche natural food diets, the no-grain diets, the diets with nothing but meat and vegetables and no byproducts?

There are pets that suffer from food responsive problems. Your veterinarian is best qualified to help you select the ideal diet for such a pet. Sometimes this may include a no-grain diet, but most often it will be a particular prescription diet that has been specially formulated to treat pets such as yours. But, when you are buying pet food, consider these facts. You have no idea who makes a store or generic brand pet food, but it’s not a major company that’s buying the highest quality ingredients or running extensive feeding trials. When you buy the niche diets, you are paying a premium for a special diet that for most pets has no advantage to the diets made by the major name-brand pet food manufactures. In fact you are paying a premium for what most professionals agree has no added value for a pet. Buy the higher quality and pricier diets from the companies you know and trust and you are investing in proven ingredients and not the marketing gimmicks that have led us to believe in the value of the all-natural and grain-free diets. Our pets have been domesticated for over 10,000 years and most thrive on high quality conventional pet foods.

(And, of course, regardless of what you feed, don’t overfeed your pet!)