Animal Nutrition-Small Animal Edition

So I NEVER thought I'd enjoy or be fascinated by anything veterinary nutrition related, but I have to say this class is pretty awesome! Dr. Hammond has thrown tons of information at us in the last four days and even more things just to ponder. I think some of my fascination comes from the fact that it all acts like a giant puzzle that you have to work out. You have to figure out each of the individual parts in order to see the complete picture.

Today we had a 2.5 hour nutrition lab with 12 stations. Each station covered a topic in pet food such as ingredients, energy/food dose calculations, label reading, weight loss products, feeding costs, canned food, palatability, additives, treats, feline lower urinary tract health claims, and oral health. The stations I found most interesting were the calculations (because I enjoy simple math), label reading, feeding costs, and oral health.

At the ingredients station, Dr. Hammond had several baggies of common pet food ingredients that are used as fiber, protein, and vitamin/mineral sources. All of the ingredients were ground into a fine powder just as you would find them used in foods. It was pretty neat to see and feel the different textures through the plastic.

At the calculation station, we calculated the resting energy requirement, daily energy requirement, and food dose for a provided scenario animal. Several food labels were available for us to choose from to calculate a food dose, which is based on each individual food. If you wish to feed Brand X's Y food, you use the kcals per cup of food to determine how many cups a day that pet should eat (based on calculations of RER and DER).

At the label reading station, we looked at various ingredients in the foods and looked at dozens of packages for AAFCO labeling. AAFCO stands for the Association of American Feed Control Officials and is a group that establishes the rules for the specific naming of a feed ingredient. They also complete feeding trials and have trial standards for companies who wish to prove that their food meets AAFCO standards. We were to look at the packages to see which foods actually had undergone AAFCO feeding trials, which were simply formulated to meet the AAFCO nutrient profiles, and which were labelled for intermittent or supplemental feeding only. That last category was a little bit scary-this is a food that is not nutritionally complete and is meant to be an add on, but there are people out there who have no idea (after all, you'd have to read all of the fine print on the label) and feed this to their pets all the time leading to deficiencies and an unbalanced diet!

We learned how to calculate how much a food costs per year to feed to a pet. This was kind of fun and now I want to figure out how much it costs to feed my pets per year! This can be clinically relevant if you need to switch a client's pet's diet and they are concerned about cost. In one example given to us, the food the owner was currently feeding was more expensive to feed per year than the prescription diet, it was just how much that was purchased at a time. The original food was bought in small quantities at a time, making it seem less expensive!

The last station we did was an examination of foods and treats that claimed to have oral health benefits. We learned that the only food items proven to back up their claims are those with the VOHC seal. The purpose of the Veterinary Oral Health Council is "to provide an independent, objective, and credible means of recognizing veterinary dental products that effectively control accumulation of plaque and/or calculus." The table had at least two dozen different products on it all claiming to benefit oral health, but surprisingly few actually had the VOHC seal on them.

All in all, the message of this lab was to be aware of what's out there in the pet food world. There are tons of different products on the market and it's important to realizing what you are actually buying and feeding your pet, and veterinarians are supposed to play a major role in helping clients to figure this out.