This entire pet food scandal could have been avoided by the pet food industry.
That is my opinion. Why?
That pet you buried would never have died from melamine, cyanuric acid or some unknown toxin due to the greed behind falsely boosting the nitrogen for profit. You wouldn't be struggling with tears caring for your sick pets and worried over the long term effects of this horrific scandal.
No? Absolutely, YES.
It would never have happened if the Pet Food Industry had followed in the footsteps of the Dairy Industry in 2000. Our U.S. Dairy Industry figured that out in 2000- that testing methods needed to be changed.
This means if the pet food industry cared about protein content, usable protein and the prices, they could have recognized this and prevented this whole melamine NPN issue from ever happening. They'd have also caught on to why it was so cheap to buy the ingredients in the first place.
http://www.holsteinusa.com/html/trueweb.htmlThe new Federal Milk Marketing Orders, which went into effect January 1, 2000, pay for protein on a true-protein scale instead of the crude-protein scale that had been used previously in many parts of the country. The change was made because true protein is more accurately measured in the lab and is more reflective of the nutritional and manufacturing value of milk....While this change does not affect the price you receive for your milk (unless you have unusually high or low levels of non-protein nitrogen in your milk), it does affect the protein level that you see with your milk payment.
If the Dairy Industry could do in 2000, there is no reason the Pet Food Industry could not have done it. After all, they are responsible for the nutritional value of the pet foods and the safety of those foods. They are supposed to know the nutritional value of the pet foods.
Here, I believe, their lie has been exposed.
I firmly believe that the pet food industry has no idea how much of the protein in the pet foods is actually providing nutrition to your pets.
How could it have been prevented? By changing the methods used to test for protein. If those methods were changed, we would be able to actually know the true amount of nutritional protein we are feeding our animals.
In a Washington Post article, Robert Poppenga and David Brown had a discussion which included Poppenga stating "Many "official" analytical methods are antiquated and there needs to be a streamlined process for validating new methods and making them widely available."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/05/04/DI2007050401776.html?hpid=discussionsA bit of explanation here. When the issues were being postulated about the source of the problems, it became very evident that the motivation was for profit. As we went further into the research, we saw that NPN, non protein nitrogen boosting for profit was for many years the practice in the Dairy Industry, not only in China with the baby formula scandal but here in the United States.
That meant that Milk may have had a lot of protein in it, however, it did not have the nutritional value one would associate with the protein levels.
They were "fake" proteins - crude proteins- that gave us the illusion the higher the protein the better the quality. Therefore, the higher the price paid to the dairy farmer for the milk.
We were feeding our animals foods with false protein. I am going to argue that we still are.
We have no statistics on the true protein amounts in our pet foods. We see "protein 50%". Wow, good! Some of us even worry if it is too high for our particular animals needs.
Hold on now, that is a programmed response from advertising. We are like trained seals applauding the label percentages following the creed of whoever wants us to believe it is all real and good and nutritious.
How much of that advertised protein 50% provides nutrition to your pet? 50%? I would venture to guess the amount is much lower than that.
Call your pet food company and ask them how much of the protein advertised on the label or on their website is "True Protein"? Call your pet food company and ask them "How much of the protein content advertised as being in your pet food has true nutritional value to the pets?"Don't let them tell you the same number on the label. It most likely would be myth- A well versed, hidden fact.
It is a myth that is beginning to be exposed.
Part of my anger about the whole issue of boosting protein levels for profit without regard to nutrition has been very well written today in the Scientific American Article by Alison Snyder "Protein Pretense":
Protein Pretense
Cheating the standard protein tests is easy, but industry hesitates on alternatives.. July 15 2007 Scientific American.com Alison Snyder
http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=ACB480D7-E7F2-99DF-386D411734605ECCAfter hundreds of dogs and cats fell ill this past spring, government officials traced the source to melamine, a nitrogen-rich compound found in plastics and fertilizer that, when ingested by the animals, crystallized in their kidneys and caused renal failure. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration later announced that producers may have deliberately added the compound to wheat gluten and rice protein concentrates to inflate the measured amount of protein. The greater the protein level in the concentrates, the higher the market price the products fetch. Regardless of whether its addition was deliberate or accidental, melamine snuck past standard industry protein analysis, suggesting that the century-old test methods should be reevaluated. Several alternatives exist, but the food industry has yet to make a switch.
(snip)
Thus far pet food makers and other processors have not decided whether to adopt new methods. “We’re in the process of building a feed safety protocol,” says Ron Salter, a vice president at feed distribution company Wilbur-Ellis in San Francisco. He adds that the company will be looking into feed sampling and testing procedures. In the meantime, nitrogen-based methods will likely remain top dog among protein-testing techniques.
, take the time to look with eyes & mind wide open and research what led up to the development of the pet food scandal and how it could have been prevented by the pet food industry. We need to get "in front" of the problem, not dance around in frustration shutting the door on imports and scapegoating China while they keep letting these myths survive and sit back in boardrooms claiming victim to greed of those Chinese merchants.
It was the greed of the Pet Food industry that allowed the scandal. It still is. They need to change their protein testing methods. They need to advertise the true nutritional value of the pet foods, not their measurements of fake nutrition.
