@Unofficial_Member “You can’t call label something as quackery just because you’re personally against/don’t believe in it.”
When did I say I was against it? If you want to put your pet on a raw diet, go ahead. I have no problem with it, and I have no reason to believe that it would be unhealthy. But there is no reliable scientific data to support the notion that a raw diet is the only way to keep a pet healthy.
“The information in the video is plausible and realistic.”
Plausibility is the standard for a hypothesis, not a conclusion. And “realistic” seems to be nothing more than an empty buzzword here. In any case, the information presented in the video is not plausible. I’m not going to do a point-by-point refutation of an 11 minute video that cannot even go to the trouble of properly documenting its sources, but here are a two key points.
(1) The video starts off quite wrong by asserting that “one point that no one’s going to argue about is that for optimal health to occur, animals must consume the foods they were designed to eat.” This is either trivial or false. It’s trivial if all it means is “a healthy diet is part of being optimally healthy.” It’s false if it means “for a contemporary member of a species to be healthy, it must eat the same foods that its ancestors ate while its species was evolving.” Malnutrition and food scarcity are constant problems in nature, and no species evolved under wholly ideal conditions. It does not follow from this that modern animals should only consume foods from sources that were available to their ancestors.
This also raises the question of which ancestors we should be taking as representative. Cats and dogs have been domesticated from a variety of species, and their lineages are not always well known. But given that different potential ancestors had wildly different diets, anyone who thinks that animals must eat the same foods their ancestors ate is left with the nearly impossible task of tracking down not just what kind of canine or feline their pet is descended from, but which region of the world their specific ancestors came from (keeping in mind that many species used to be far more widespread than they are today). It gets even more complicated when we get into other types of pets, such as birds, lizards, and rodents.
Furthermore, Becker concludes from her (not actually inarguable) assertion that “carnivorous animals must [therefore] eat fresh whole prey for optimal health.” But this does not follow at all. The digestive tract does not distinguish between eating a whole cow and only part of one, except to the extent that eating a whole cow would be enough food to kill the vast majority of domesticated animals. For another, the hierarchical feeding habits of some species means that many individual members did not get to eat their prey at peak freshness. In short, the supposedly inarguable foundation of the video rests on complete ignorance of the actual evolutionary history of the animals it discusses.
(2) The only attempt at providing a scientific basis for the claims made in the video comes in the form of a reference to the Pottenger cat study. Becker does not cite the actual study (despite the fact that going back to the primary source is standard scientific practice), but instead cites this write up of the study—a write up that ultimately undermines her claims. The author, Guillermo Díaz (who, again, is Becker’s own source), summarizes the flaws in Pottenger’s study this way:
“There were no good scientific controls. All of the cats were donated and Dr. Pottenger didn’t know the thorough history of each one. Most of them were strays, which can lead to statistical errors. Concerning the food: the composition of the diet was not constant during the ten year period, because of its origin, it varied in freshness and quality.”
Let’s look at that last bit: the composition of the diet was not constant despite the fact that this was a diet study. I am not trying to denigrate Pottenger here. His work can be valuable even if it is not complete. But let’s not pretend that we can draw broad conclusions from a poorly controlled diet study that didn’t even manage to keep the factor being studied—the diet—constant throughout the experiment. Let us also look at what has been learned about nutrition (both human and feline) in the 80 years since the study was done. As Díaz notes, all of Pottenger’s findings are consistent with a taurine deficiency.
Though he could only conjecture about the specifics at the time, it turns out that what Pottenger actually discovered is that certain ways of processing food (e.g., cooking or pasteurization) can remove nutrients (e.g., taurine) that may be essential to some of its consumers (e.g., cats). This is valuable information, to be sure. But it has also been taken into account already: taurine has been added to pet food for decades.
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