« on: December 05, 2016, 02:00:21 PM »
By Dr. Becker
As many of you are aware, I regularly scan pet food industry journals to keep an eye out for "innovations" in processed dog and cat food. Generally speaking, the industry's focus is on finding and exploiting inexpensive "novel" ingredients that are not species-appropriate for dogs and cats.
Rice Bran: A 'Superfood' for Dogs?
Recently, this headline caught my eye:
"Rice bran becomes functional, sustainable dog superfood. A wasted resource could become a money-saving, eco-friendly dog food ingredient."1
Note the catchwords in the headline:
*Functional
*Sustainable
*Superfood
*Money-saving
*Eco-friendly
These are the same marketing buzzwords pet food companies use to attract you, a potential customer, to their products. In this case, a company called RiceBran Technologies (a supplier of rice bran) is using marketing spin to attract its customers, pet food producers.
Obviously, foods that actually have all the attributes listed above are wonderful. However, when it comes to this particular ingredient, it's a situation of "good words gone bad."
Rice bran is about as far removed from a superfood for dogs (or cats) as it gets, so its remaining advertised advantages are irrelevant and potentially misleading. I encourage you to keep marketing tactics and buzzwords in mind when you're shopping for pet food.
Unfortunately, use of the words "sustainable" and "eco-friendly" to describe pet food usually means someone has discovered yet another way to incorporate waste from the human food industry into processed dog or cat food.
Continued at:
http://healthypets.mercola.com/sites/healthypets/archive/2016/12/05/avoid-dog-food-containing-rice-bran.aspx
Logged
"In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn't merely try to train him to be semihuman. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog." Edward Hoagland
"Thorns may hurt you, men desert you, sunlight turn to fog; but you're never friendless ever, if you have a dog."