“100% complete and balanced"???

Shouldn’t I look for foods that are “100% complete and balanced"?

We summarize some of the most glaring issues with this statement below, but for an even more in depth exploration of this topic, we highly recommend Dr. Randy Wysong's (founder and director of Wysong Corporation) "The Myth of 100% Complete Processed Pet Foods".

The various forms of the phrase “complete and balanced” that appear on a bag of pet food are far less binding for the maker of that product than you would otherwise expect.  The standards to which pet foods must conform to make these statements are regulated by the American Association of Feed Control Officials--or AAFCO.  Virtually every pet food on the market will carry statements that they have passed AAFCO feeding trials for “all life stages”, “puppies”, “pregnant/lactating mothers”, etc.

Unfortunately, these standards leave a lot to be desired--beginning with the testing criteria itself:

• 8 dogs older than 1 yr. must start the test
• At start all dogs must be normal weight & health.
• A blood test is to be taken from each dog at the start and finish of the test.
• For 6 months, the dogs used must only eat the food being tested.
• The dogs finishing the test must not lose more than 15% of their body weight.
• During the test, none of the dogs used are to die or be removed becasue of nutritional causes.
• 6 of the 8 dogs starting must finish the test.

And that’s it.  There’s no accounting for the research regarding raw diets--the tests only relate to cooked/processed food.  The assumption is also made that dogs are best maintained on a grain-based diet, even though much research suggests they are carnivores, and even ignore the digestive contents of their prey.  Thus these feeding trials assume that dogs can get as much nutrition from grains as they do from meat, and that raw meat provides no added benefit.  The issue of digestive availability is even more important in a general sense:  the AAFCO standards assume 100% nutrient availability.  Thus if the nutrient exists in the food, your dog must be able to digest it, despite substantial evidence to the contrary.

Sometimes feeding trials are not even performed, and a chemical analysis is instead performed, as discussed by a University of Tennessee DVM here.

And what about the short-term scope of the trial?  These tests provide little insight on how a pet will respond to a food over the course of its life.  Many manufacturers also over-supplement their products with synthetic vitamins and minerals to meet these purely mathematical standards, which raises two major concerns.

First, if they have the right percentage of vitamin C for a 17 week old Australian Shepherd puppy (how they’ve determined that the nutritional requirements of dogs are so scientifically measurable and nuanced is never explained) with the exact percentage of protein to ensure its “complete and balanced” nutrition, the food is considered adequate.  Second, this over-supplementation of the product could be resulting in long-term negative consequences for your pets, yet these feeding trials are far too limited in both the size of the sample (a mere eight animals), and their short time period.