Pets follow fad diets adopted by owners and worry veterinarians

Karl Malone starts his day with a breakfast that includes ashwagandha root, or Indian ginseng, and ground psyllium husk. His dinner is always seasoned with ground turmeric, and he doesn’t stop taking supplements for his joints. He takes two brisk walks a day and avoids restaurant food as his doctor has recommended he lose weight.

Karl Malone is a dog – an 11-year-old brown Australian Shepherd mix.

Darshna Shah, her owner, thinks her partner’s health has greatly improved thanks to this “wellness” regimen – a mix of advice from friends, her vet and pet newsletters, along with nutritional remedies used by her family in India. in your childhood.

A former insurance executive who lives in Cerritos, Calif., Shah, 64, thought in the past that as long as her pets had a home and were well fed, they would be fine. But the growing focus on the concept of “wellness”, especially among younger people, convinced her that she needed to do more. “Their quality of life depends on their health.”

The number of people adopting pets in the US has skyrocketed during the pandemic, reaching 1 million in 2021, the highest in nearly six years. And pet owners have devoted attention and money to what their dogs, cats, hamsters, goldfish and other pets consume.

For many people, the solution lies in customizing their pets’ diet to resemble their own eating habits.

There are pets that follow raw food diets, gluten-free diets, grain-free diets, vegan or vegetarian diets. Some pets consume delicacies or spicy drinks, such as lattes with turmeric or CBD (cannabidiol). Others can’t go without a probiotic or vitamin C supplement. Some pet owners create special menus for them at home, while others prefer to choose from the ever-growing range of products on the market that are tailor-made for these regimens.

Oscar, a terrier-chihuahua cross who lives in Brooklyn, New York, is a vegetarian, as is his owner, Roopa Kalyanaraman Marcello, 42. An expert in public health policy, she feeds her dog store-bought vegetarian food.

“He’s part of the family,” she explained. “I would find it very strange if one of my children started eating meat.”

Last year, Jennifer Donald, 52, began to suspect that the wheat-based food she fed her Labrador, Moses, was responsible for his digestive problems.

Jennifer has celiac disease and doesn’t eat gluten. She recently adopted the same diet for Moses, feeding him wild salmon, sweet potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, coconut oil and rice — the same ingredients she uses to prepare grain-based bowls for herself and her husband.

“It’s helped me get more in tune with him, and it’s been helping me control my illness,” said she, who teaches criminal justice at the University of Maryland.

There are no clear and simple rules on how to feed a pet. The FDA has issued warnings about certain animal diets and regulates the manufacture and labeling of pet food, but gives much vaguer guidance on ingredients. Veterinarians’ opinions vary, and scientific research on pet health lags far behind human studies. The internet is full of advice and misinformation. It is primarily up to the owners to decide who to trust.

The American Kennel Club, a central registry for dogs, offers educational materials and online diet recommendations, all verified and approved by their veterinary director. That’s why the entity’s vice president of communications, Brandi Hunter Munden, regrets when she sees people adhering to fad diets that, according to her, can pose the same risks to pets as they pose to humans.

Munden said such diets can perpetuate generalizations about health, promote regimens that aren’t supported by research, and capitalize on the anxiety of people who fear they aren’t doing enough for their animals.

raw food trend

The market for so-called “nutritious pet food” – that is, more expensive products that claim to contain high-value or nutritionally enriched ingredients – is expected to move up to $17.9 billion in 2026, according to a forecast released last year by the analytics company. Independent Pet Insight. Pet wellness in general has now grown into an even bigger industry and has given way to a whole subset of influencers and Facebook groups dedicated to improving the diets of domesticated animals of all kinds.

As the human birth rate has steadily dropped in the United States, many people are beginning to regard their pets as their children in some way.

“Saying ‘my dog ​​eats as well as a human’ is a way of showing off,” said Sean MacDonald, 30, who is a chef in Toronto. On his TikTok account, he prepares complex meals for his chocolate Labrador retriever, Hazelnut, made mostly from raw ingredients.

The intense focus on what pets eat is also linked to the longer time many pet owners have spent with their pets during the pandemic, a period in which many people have also begun to pay more attention to their own health, said Hunter Munden, the executive at Kennel Club.

But imposing a new lifestyle on a loved one can get complicated when that being can’t communicate or make decisions on their own, she said. “A dog will eat anything you put in front of him, but that’s not always the best thing for him.”

In 1999, human and animal nutritionist Kymythy Schultze, 63, published a book on raw food for pets entitled “The Ultimate Diet: Natural Nutrition for Dogs and Cats”. She had started feeding her pets this way after eliminating processed foods from her own diet to alleviate her health problems. The premise is similar to that of the paleo diet: that people should eat as their Stone Age ancestors did.

Many readers found her recommendations too radical. According to Schultze, veterinarians have told him that pets can only survive on canned or bagged food. “How did cats and dogs survive for thousands and thousands of years?” she asked. “Packed and canned food hasn’t been around that long.”

The book sold tens of thousands of copies. And raw pet food — which includes vegetables, animal proteins, bones and other uncooked ingredients — has gone from being a very small minority to a fad, despite being advised against by many experts.

In recent years the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the American Veterinary Medical Association and the American Association of Animal Hospitals have criticized the raw food diet for pets, saying it is dangerous and citing the risk of some raw foods are contaminated with harmful bacteria.

But writer Wes Siler, of Bozeman, Montana, said the diet Schultze outlined transformed the health of his dogs, Wiley, Bowie and Teddy. For nearly four years he has been feeding them raw chicken thighs, chicken livers and salmon and says the skin irritations the dogs had are gone. Siler, 41, thinks the kibble is “poison for dogs”, comparing it to fast food, which he says he hasn’t eaten in 25 years.

veterinary voices

Ideas about who are authorized voices in the field of pet health are changing, and a growing distrust of veterinarians underpins many owners’ interest in the “wellness” of their pets.

Schultze, the author of the raw food diet book, said pet food manufacturers exert strong influence over veterinarians by offering them product discounts and even owning veterinary hospitals.

When her vet didn’t support her proposal to feed her dog raw food, Kayla Kowalski, 21, took her pet to a holistic veterinarian who agreed with her. Holistic veterinarians often use practices such as acupuncture and homeopathy alongside Western medicine.

Haley Totes started adding fresh foods like bone broth, beef ribs, green beans and kefir to her dogs’ diets after seeing a TikTok post in which a person listed the processed ingredients in pet food and reading about diets online. . “Some vets are wary of raw food, even if it’s made at home,” she said.

Veterinarians, meanwhile, get frustrated when people trust social media posts more than advice from medical professionals.

“Pet owners trust us to make recommendations about their pets’ health on things like, ‘Your pet has a tumor; we need to excise it and do a biopsy,'” commented San Luis Obispo veterinarian Marcus Dela Cruz. , California. “But when we make recommendations about food, the reaction is different.”

He acknowledges that he gets a discount on pet food, but said, “I don’t recommend this brand’s pet food to all customers.”

According to Dela Cruz, there is a lot of misinformation online about pet health, and animals are suffering for it. Raw meats can contain antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and home-cooked meals can lack essential nutrients. Vegetarian diets, he said, are not suitable for most cats because felines need animal protein, but they may be acceptable for dogs.

Yishian Yao, 30, is a manager for an animal care company in El Cerrito, California. For her, the culture of “wellness” for pets can seem not only classy, ​​since many pet owners cannot afford to buy supplements and fresh food for their animals, but also manipulative.

The message, she says, is: “If you don’t do it for your pet’s health, you’re not a good parent.”

Yao speculates that the popular idea that pets are like family members may actually have been harmful to the animals, “by evaluating their food through the lens of human value.”

“It’s not that I don’t think pets should be treated and cared for like family members,” she said. “What I think is wrong is when we treat them like they’re human when they’re not. Is that really what’s best for them?”

_{Translation by Clara Allain}