Local labels and lies

I'm into supporting local farmers, but I've learned that it helps to buy direct. If you are following the FDA News feed on my website (www.susanwynn.com), you might have noticed this morning that some of the recalled Salmonella-tainted peanuts from the Georgia plant made their way into a product labeled....Virginia Roasted Peanuts. Sigh.

Have I mentioned that I support sustainable agriculture and local farms?

This article is from Farm and Ranch Guide: http://www.farmandranchguide.com/articles/2009/01/31/ag_news/livestock_news/live20.txt
The article suggests that the industrial meat industry has no need for veterinarians - their system that pushes gigantic numbers of confined animals through a chemical-laden system quickly requires no medical expertise. OK....do we all need to eat that much meat?

What's behind the vet shortage

By CAROL RYAN DUMAS, For Farm & Ranch Guide
Saturday, January 31, 2009 3:38 PM CST

The shortage of food supply veterinarians facing animal agriculture and endangering public health is being fueled by several factors.

“One of the big reasons is there is a growing disconnect” with farming, said David Kirkpatrick, spokesman for the American Veterinary Medicine Association. “Fewer farm kids are pursuing a field of their upbringing.”

Another big part of the problem is that veterinary schools in the United States have not grown in size in two decades. There are 2,500 veterinary graduates each year, and colleges just aren't able to accommodate any more. One reason for that is that the federal government hasn't increased funding to those colleges for 30 years.

“Many were founded by the states they're in, and there's not enough state support to maintain growth,” he said.


That doesn't mean the overall number of veterinarians is down. In 1980, U.S. veterinarians numbered 32,037; in 2007, that number grew to 83,730, according to AVMA.

But there is a huge disparity in large animal and small animal practices. In 1980, farm animal veterinarians, excluding equine practitioners, numbered 5,554; by 2007, that number had dropped to 5,090. In comparison, companion animal veterinarians numbered 15,808 in 1980; by 2007, that number had grown to 44,785.


“At the turn of the 20th century, virtually all veterinarians were farm animal veterinarians,” Kirkpatrick said. “With social changes, the pet area exploded.”

Another reason for the looming shortage is natural attrition of older veterinarians retiring from large animal practices, with fewer graduates wanting to take their place, he said.

Long-time veterinarian and R-CALF USA President/Region VI Director Max Thornsberry sees things differently, saying a vertically integrated industry is pushing food supply veterinarians out of business.

Thornsberry has practiced in central Missouri since graduating veterinary college about 30 years ago, and he's seen the swine industry there change drastically.

Large confined feeding operations took over the independent swine operations and brought in their own veterinarians to mass treat the animals. Independent veterinary practices had to go to primarily treating companion animals or go by the wayside.

“Thirty years ago, you could set up in any town and make a living; you can't do it anymore” without a small animal practice, he said.

With the ability of packers today to completely own supply and hold the animals captive, they never enter the market, and the services of private practitioners is no longer needed, he explained.

“They don't buy anything from anybody locally,” except electricity and hiring a few people, he said,

Years ago, Thornsberry used to have 100 producers with 20 sows each who called him every week. Now Cargill employs one veterinarian for the whole state and operates with service technicians instead.

“I'm completely shut out of the system. It's completely contained so I can't access it,” he said. “I haven't sold a vial of swine vaccine in 20 years.

“The industry no longer uses practitioners. You can't make a living doctoring emergency farm calls,” he added.

The same thing happened in the poultry industry, and the cattle industry now runs the same risk with three major packers controlling most of the supply, he said.

“Swine is gone, poultry is gone, and cattle is rapidly going that route,” he said. “The shortage of veterinarians is a way for someone to make a living when they get out of veterinary school. It's supply and demand.”

And there's more at stake than jobs for veterinarians.

“Not only can we not access the market but if they (packers) collapse, we lose the infrastructure,” Thornsberry said.

“I don't think there's anything that can be done to correct the problem until we correct the way agriculture is going - if we don't make a change and put a stop to this integrated system in the cattle industry” he added.

Kirkpatrick said AVMA acknowledges that certain regions of the country don't suffer a shortage of food supply veterinarians.

“One size doesn't fit all,” he said. “There are areas of the country where it's just fine and other areas where there are shortages, and it's going to get worse.”

Quality of taurine and carnitine supplements

New (ish) from: Bragg RR, Freeman LM, Fascetti AJ, Yu Z, 2009. Composition, disintegrative properties and labeling compliance of commercially available taurine and carnitine dietary supplements. JAVMA 234:209-213

Dietary supplements still have a bad rap with nutritionists, who worry about whether they will be effective or harmful. Quality control is the major sticking point, as dietary supplements - especially for animals - lack consistent regulatory oversight to ensure the companies are putting what they say they do in the bottles. Some frightening papers about probiotics come to mind - one published in 2002 showed that NO veterinary products had labels that accurately reflected their contents. One of those products was a very popular probiotic product used by most professional dog handlers and breeders.

So one of the authors of this paper is a nutritionist married to a cardiologist, and her interest was in 2 nutraceuticals used in certain forms of heart disease - carnitine and taurine.

To give you the punchline, 10 of 11 taurine products contained within 10% of the taurine contents claimed on their labels, while 3 of 11 were within 5% of the label claim. For carnitine products, 6/10 were within 5% of the label claim and all fell within 10% of the label claim. So the only product that was significantly different from what the label claimed was Jarrow Formulas Taurine 1000.

Could have been a bad lot, a bad day or an inaccurate analysis, but it DOES serve as a heads up - that's a veteran company that many trust, and it would serve us well to stay in touch with the companies we trust, showing concern about results like this.

These were all products for human consumption, as most of the veterinary companies concentrate on making formulas. I wonder if the result would have been different had these companies been members of the National Animal Supplement Council?

Factoid: Carrageenan

Carrageenan is a polysaccharide (a linear galactan sugar with alternative 1-3 and 1-4 linkages, to be exact), that is extracted from several species of red seaweed. In pet foods, it is used to make canned foods hold together and come out of the can nicely.

Polysaccharides like this can serve as 'food' for intestinal bacteria, which ferment it to produce short chain fatty acids. These fatty acids are good in that they create an optimal environment for good bacteria in the gut and can help suppress the "bad" ones, and these fatty acids can also be used as fuel by the cells that line the gut.

These bacteria also degrade taurine, which is secreted into the gut as part of bile, and re-absorbed from the gut further down the line. But if these bacteria are extremely active, it's possible that they can degrade too much taurine. This is one theory to explain why cats need more taurine when they eat canned food.

Anantharaman-Barr et al. Fecal Bile Acid Excretion and Taurine Status in Cats Fed
Canned and Dry Diets. J. Nutr. 124: 2546S-2551S, 1994.

Irradiation and pet food

Champion Petfoods has pulled out of the Australian market following the recall of all Orijen raw foods sold there. The foods were associated with an outbreak of serious neurologic disease in Australian cats. Some cats have had to be euthanized and a few seem to be improving slightly on antioxidant therapy.

As it turns out, Australia requires that raw pet food be subjected to large doses of radiation to kill parasites, and that level of radiation destroys the Vitamin A. The company researched the industry extensively and found supporting science:

From the Champion Petfoods website:

"1. Research findings of a 2007 study published by the AMERICAN COLLEGE OF VETERINARY PATHOLOGISTS.... determined that the feeding of a gamma-irradiated diet of 35-45 kGy was associated with the development of the same conditions as are reported in cats in Australia.

2. JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR LABORATORY ANIMAL SCIENCES, vol 47, no. 6, 61-66. November 2008 entitled “EFFECTS OF GAMMA IRRADIATION AND PASTEURIZATION ON THE NUTRITIVE COMPOSITION OF COMMERCIALLY AVAILABLE ANIMAL DIETS” finds that “results raise questions regarding the suitability of gamma-irradiated diets for
the long-term exclusive feeding of cats in particular, given that such feeding regimes have been associated with the development of leukoencephalomyelopathy in this species”

So apparently much higher levels of radiation are used on raw pet foods than would be considered for raw meat for human consumption. Still. I'll continue to try and buy organic and local.

Antioxidants for well pets?

Supplementation with antioxidants has been a well-loved and popular strategy for people and pets for decades, on the assumption that aging is associated with oxidative stress, and that antioxidants can slow some of these aging changes. As a practitioner who has seen clear turn-arounds in the quality of life of geriatric pets when I first began using antioxidants 18 or 19 years ago, I believe there is a shortage in some patients. I believe that antioxidants are clinically useful in old dogs and cats with inflammatory and degenerative conditions.

However, some naturopaths and veterinarians have recommended more antioxidants in healthy middle aged people and pets, presumably to slow aging changes before they become clinically obvious. I was one of them for a few years. But recent large clinical trials in people have suggested that taking extra antioxidants (mostly vitamins A,E,C and selenium) actually *increase* all cause mortality in people taking them for wellness and disease prevention (Bjelakovic 2007). It would appear that Vitamin C and selenium appear safest but that vitamins A and E are associated with problems. Of course, this paper does not prove a temporal relationship, explore whether different doses pose different risks, discuss the various forms of vitamins that might be involved, or really explore cause-specific mortality .... but still. It's a worry.

Now a study (Moyer 2009) shows that canine red blood cell concentrations of a major intracellular antioxidant (glutathione) are not different between young and old dogs. Similarly, plasma cysteine, an extracellular antioxidant, did not differ between young and old dogs. In well dogs. Granted, these were dogsowned by students and employees at the University of Wisconsin's veterinary school, and the dogs were fed a variety of diets. It might be possible to find a subgroup of dogs, eating particular types of diets, who did show evidence of antioxidant depletion. But the point is that this is a real world situation - most healthy old dogs are not antioxidant depleted. Oh, and many food companies are increasing antioxidant levels in their senior diets, which might not be a good thing.

As it turns out, 19 of the 35 older dogs were being fed diets that are supplemented in vitamin E, and 10 were being fed diets supplemented with Vitamin C. Calculations showed that although there was no real difference in vitamin C concentrations being fed to young and old dogs, the young dogs were recieving significantly more Vitamin E. These levels really don't approach those that we would use therapeutically in a nutraceutical supplement, however.

Now on the other hand, the same group from University of Wisconsin measured red blood cell glutathione, and plasma cysteine and Vitamin C in ill dogs (Viviano, 2008). Clinically ill, client-owned dogs and cats were compared to well dogs and cats. In this study, significantly lower erythrocyte glutathione concentrations were found in ill dogs compared with controls, and glutathione depletion correlated with illness severity as well as mortality. Interestingly, cats had higher ascorbate concentrations when ill compared with controls. So this looks like ill dogs are antioxidant depleted and that low glutathione levels lend a poor prognosis. In cats, the elevation in vitamin C is a strange finding and yet another example of why cats really cannot be treated like dogs or people.

So here's the take home. Don't supplement vitamins A,C,E, or selenium to healthy pets who are eating balanced diets. If you are feeding homemade diets, on the other hand, make sure that the diet has been computer balanced to provide at least the daily requirements of Vitamins A,E and selenium. And if a pet has a chronic inflammatory problem (like arthritis, immune-mediated diseases, cancer, kidney disease...) or undergoes a number of days of hospitalization, supplementation makes sense.


References

Bjelakovic G, Nikolova D, Gluud LL, Simonetti RG, Gluud C. Mortality in randomized trials of antioxidant supplements for primary and secondary prevention: systematic review and meta-analysis.JAMA. 2007 Feb 28;297(8):842-57.

Moyer KL, Trepanier LA. Erythrocyte glutathione and plasma cysteine concentrations in young vs old dogs. J AM Vet Med Assoc 2009;234:95-99

Viviano KR, Lavergne SN, Goodman L, Vanderwielen B, Grundahl L, Padilla M, Trepanier LA. Glutathione, Cysteine, and Ascorbate Concentrations in Clinically Ill Dogs and Cats. J Vet Intern Med. 2008 Dec 16.

Why do people supplement enzymes to perfectly healthy dogs?

This is a very common recommendation, especially among raw feeders, that I have failed in understanding. Let's back up a minute.

Enzymes are vital to growth and life. Digestive enzymes break down fats, proteins and carbohydrates so that food is transformed into building blocks that can be absorbed by the intestine. Metabolic enzymes are present in every cell to allow the cell to do its work, which is usually producing a functional product of some sort, or maintaining its structure for support of body activities.

Supplementation of metabolic enzymes is not common, and even if it were, not much make it to the cells that the supplementer is theoretically targeting because they would be, to a large degree, digested in the GI tract and not absorbed in whole, functional form. On the other hand, digestive enzymes are active right in the gut where we put them. We use them for animals who have diminished digestive capacity, such as those with exocrine pancreatic deficiency, or in geriatric animals who may have atrophy in some of the cells that produce these enzymes.

Sounds good on the surface of it - help animals digest their food better. But that implies that there is some problem with digestion in healthy animals. Here's the rub - supplementation of pancreatic enzymes actually *inhibits* normal pancreatic enzyme excretion. In fact, we use digestive enzyme supplements in dogs and people with pancreatitis for just this purpose - to suppress the release of pancreatic enzymes which contribute to the pain of pancreatitis after meals.

So not only are paying for expensive enzyme supplements that probably are not necessary, but we are chronically telling a normal pancreas not to do its job.

Here is just a recent clinical study that proves this feedback inhibition in people, and it has been shown in dogs as well.

Walkowiak J, Witmanowski H, Strzykala K, Bychowiec B, Songin T, Borski K, Herzig KH. Inhibition of endogenous pancreatic enzyme secretion by oral pancreatic enzyme treatment. Eur J Clin Invest 2003; 33 (1): 65–69

Nustede R, Schmidt WE, Jager M, Stockmann F, Kohler H, Folsch UR et al. Gastrin-releasing peptide and CCK after intraduodenal inhibition of proteases in dogs. Int J Pancreatol 1994;15:209–14.

So I'd like to hear convincing arguments from those who recommend supplementing healthy animals with digestive enzymes. Why do it and what proof do you have that it's good for them?