Toxic Nutrition
This week we will learn about how companies try to replicate fresh foods in the form of added vitamins and minerals. Causing toxicity, chronic health conditions and even death ☠️
Kibble/canned and even some raw food companies supplement for fresh food by adding “necessary vitamin packets” and often up dosing for lack of bioavailability. Which is where it gets dangerous.
Iodine: Essential for healthy thyroid function. Easily achieved by feeding small oily fish or phytoplankton.
Don’t want to feed fish? Think adding kelp is the answer? Easy does it - so high in iodine it can easily be fed in toxic quantities!
Some times it’s even added to raw food pre mades as an attempt to balance or be able to call it a “SURF” Product.
Iodine induced hyperthyroidism is usually the condition that is caused when supplementing long term for iodine with kelp products. Almost never an issue when feeding whole fresh foods.
Short term iodine toxicity - ie: my dog ate a bottle of kelp. Can show in symptoms such as diarrhea, vomiting, swelling of air ways, turning blue, weak pulse and coma.
Vitamin D supplementation. Perhaps the most dangerous of them all!
Synthetic vitamin D3 (Cholecalciferol) not being very bioavailable as sourced from lanolin. Kibble/canned and some raw food companies need to find a perfect balance of using enough that the amount absorbed needed to regulate the balance and retention of calcium and phosphorus. But not up dosing enough to be toxic over time or immediate consumption.
High levels of vitamin D can cause serious health problems. Vitamin D is a fat soluble vitamin, and unlike water soluble vitamins, when a dog gets too much, the access is not rapidly excreted in their urine. Instead it is stored in fat tissue and the liver.
Excessive vitamin D can lead to kidney failure and even death. Leading us to some of the biggest class action law suits nation wide. Most recently Hill’s Pet Nutrition.
Cholecalciferol is the chemical name for Vit D3 (Most commonly recognized as the main ingredient in most rat poisons) Toxicity over a period of time (in food) can lead to diarrhea, frequent urination, drooling excessively and excessive weight loss and eventually kidney failure. In high concentrated doses (ate a bottle of supplements or rat poison) this process can start in a matter of hours causing almost immediate organ failure.
https://www.avma.org/javma-news/2020-02-15/update-fda-says-hills-failed-follow-own-procedures