Fad and Exotic Dog Diets May Have Downside

I'm a fan of the SkepVet blog.

This is her take on Grain-free Diets and Heart Disease in Dogs:

For some years now, grains such as wheat and corn in dog and cat foods have been demonized by many in the alternative medicine world. There has never been any real scientific evidence to support all the hysterical claims about grains as a risk factor for disease, and there is no reason to believe so-called “grain-free” diets have any health benefits at all. Sadly, many pet food companies have chosen to play into this fad by offering such diets and marketing them in ways that suggest they are better for our pets than diets which contain such ingredients. This has led to an increase in potato and taro root and other alternative carbohydrate sources in dog and coat food with no evidence that these are in any way safer or healthier than the much-despised wheat and corn.

I’ve been fairly neutral towards this diet fad. While I have always maintained that the claims about grains are implausible and unsubstantiated, I assumed that as long as the alternative diets met the established nutritional standards for pet foods generally, they were probably no worse than existing diets even if there was no reason to think they were better. I have a natural dislike for pseudoscientific fads, but I still believe in judging claims on the evidence, and without any evidence I refrained from any judgement against such diets.

Earlier this year, however, I saw a couple of golden retrievers with an unusual heart condition, known as Dilated Cardiomyopathy (DCM). This can be caused by a variety of genetic and environmental factors, but these cases were a bit atypical, and after some testing we discovered that these dogs had a deficiency in an amino acid called taurine, which has been associated with DCM. This deficiency is unusual in dogs fed balanced and complete commercial diets, and these dogs were on commercial grain-free diets that supposedly included all necessary nutrients.

Read the whole thing here.

Bottom line: "[T]he idea behind the health claims for grain-free diets is speculative at best and very likely untrue. Extreme diet fads hardly ever turn out to be a good idea in people, and the same is probably true for pets.... The diet you are feeding may be perfectly fine, but it is also probable not any better than any other diet with more conventional ingredients, and there is now some small indication that it may place some dogs at greater risk for this preventable disease."