[Sca-cooks] Dog nutrition, was: OOP - Fw: Jasper...

[Tara Sersen Boroson]

>> <<Also, onions and garlic are extremely dangerous. >>
>>
>> I know the onions are, at least for cats.  I know that onions and 
>> garlic are
>> in the same family.  I also know that Nutro brand cat food, and other 
>> cat food
>> and cat treats I've looked at, contain garlic.  If it is so 
>> dangerous, how
>> can that be?  Our 5 year old cat was on Nutro kitten food in the pet 
>> store and
>> has been on Nutro foods all her life, and is not anemic.
>>
>> Brangwayna
>
>
> I fed my dog a clove of garlic monthly to help with his intestinal 
> tract (and the sidebar of that is it helps reduce fleas) as 
> recommended by his doctor.  Did that for years.  So I was wondering 
> over this statement too.
> Olwen


Unfortunately, my source has disappeared.  :( 

I used to work for a company called BioValidity that reviewed medical 
and veterinary literature on dietary supplements (that is, vitamins, 
herbs and foods that were reputed to have health benefits.)  They had 
some of the top medical and veterinary researchers in the country 
reviewing and rating published research on hundreds of supplements, 
documenting the evidence for claims as well as precautions and so on.  I 
considered the quality of their work to be top notch.  When I looked up 
garlic for the traditional claim of helping with flea control (medically 
proven to be false, by the way,) I learned about the whole haemolytic 
anemia thing.  There were a number of studies listed.

Unfortunately, the company is out of business.  They got their start 
publishing a very popular book, the BioNutritional Encyclopedia, which 
had human medical data.  GNC asked them to turn the book into a database 
for a kiosk in their stores.  It was the height of the internet startup 
craze, and they said - hey, we could sell this to other companies.  That 
was when they began the veterinary database as well.  Unfortunately, the 
internet novelty craze fizzled pretty quickly after that and they didn't 
make it.  Some companies didn't want a product that disputed any of the 
claims they made for their vitamins (never mind how strongly it 
supported others.)  Other companies wanted BioValidity to review their 
proprietary studies and put them in the database - but not for sale to 
their competitors, and wouldn't pay enough for our costs to do so.  
Other companies wanted something far more superficial and less 
expensive.  Basically, the company should have stuck with selling $20 
books to general consumers rather than $20,000 databases to internet 
portals and research firms.  It's a shame - it was a fantastic resource.

For both onions and garlic, as with chocolate, the dosages were high 
enough that you wouldn't have to worry about incidental exposure.  That 
is, a clove of garlic occasionally for the digestive tract, or a tiny 
bit of onion in pizza sauce, aren't going to hurt any more than a single 
chocolate chip cookie.  It was really concerned with dogs who develop a 
taste for these foods - i.e. dogs who dig up garlic from the garden and 
eat it - or people who are home cooking pet food and including onions as 
the veggie componant.  I have found a couple articles on the danger of 
garlic on the net.  They seemed to have somewhat various information on 
the topic, some saying it was safe for dogs but not cats, others that it 
was dangerous for all.  This article stated what I remember from 
BioValidity, that garlic does contain the same dangerous chemicals as 
onions though not in as high concentration: 
http://www.petalia.com.au/Templates/StoryTemplate_Process.cfm?specie=Dogs&story_no=257#ct-4

BTW, another dangerous food I forgot about is grapes/raisins.  They can 
cause acute renal failure: 
http://www.aspca.org/site/DocServer/grapes.pdf?docID=189

Christianna, I know that vit. C is in a lot of canine nutritional 
supplements.  I was surprised to hear about that one, too, for that 
reason.  But the studies on that subject were talking about 
super-dosing.   Unfortunately, I don't know what qualifies as a 
super-dose without the actual research in front of me.  What I know is 
it said that clinical cases come through the ranks from pet owners 
giving human vitamins to their pets.  Looking on the net for more 
documentation, I'm finding articles talking about benefits from small 
doses, but large doses causing diarrhea.  Personally, I've never worried 
about the vit. C component in pet vitamins, but have used it as a 
reminder never to give human doses of any supplements to pets.

-Magdalena

-- 
Tara Sersen Boroson

You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him to find it for himself. - Galileo Galilei