Before you start screaming about synthetic vitamins and pet food being so “processed” and deficient that it needs synthetic vitamins – let’s take a look at human food, and how it might not be as rich in nutrients as you might think, and why synthetic vitamins aren’t as scary as people like to make out.
Fortified foods
Human foods as far back as the 1920s have been fortified to prevent nutrition-related illnesses. The best example is milk, which has added vitamin D to enhance the absorption of calcium. Contrary to popular belief, milk might contain calcium but if it’s not bioavailable to us, we can’t make use of that source of nutrition. It’s for this reason that vitamin D, which by a number of complex pathways, activates calcium and allows it to be used and absorbed in the body.
While you might say, “I can just go outside and get vitamin D from the sun”, you might be surprised to know that 47.9% of the world’s population is deficient in vitamin D. Imagine how much worse this would be in the case of animals, who poorly absorb vitamin D through their skin?
So what other foods are fortified? Just because milk is fortified, doesn’t mean “fresh foods” would be, right? Fortification is for processed, nutritionally deficient foods…
Some examples:
Bread – folic acid, folate and B group vitamins as it is a staple food
Rice – fortified with iron
Eggs – while eggs do contain omega 3, it is added to ensure it meets recommended intakes
Fruit juice – calcium is often added to orange juice
Soy milk and other milk alternatives – added vitamin D, A and calcium for people who cannot consume cows milk
Yogurt – sterols and stanols added to reduce cholesterol
Salt – iodized to enhance thyroid function
But fortification is only needed when food is processed, right? What if I eat unprocessed foods? Aren’t they more nutrient dense?
Actually even unprocessed foods will be fortified to some extent, through the process of biofortification. This is performed by breeding crops to increase their nutritional value, which can include both conventional selective breeding, and genetic engineering.
Regardless, you can’t escape fortification – and I’m not sure you’d want to. Undernutrition and nutrient deficiency is estimated globally to cause the deaths of between 3 and 5 million people per year – fortification is designed to reduce harm and improve access to safe and nutritious food.
So if everything is fortified, then I don’t need to take a multivitamin!
While fortification is designed to reduce this horrible statistic, we need to remember that even with fortification, we still need to be eating enough of everything to meet daily recommended intakes and in the right combination to achieve a balanced diet.
Which is easier said than done. All food has variable nutrient profiles and these then change with cooking – some methods of cooking can increase or decrease the availability of different nutrients so really, you probably should still be taking a multivitamin to fill any small gaps in nutrition that are unavoidable. For people with a disability or medical condition, their nutritional needs may differ significantly to that of the general public, and so in these cases they should receive supplementation that is tailored to their needs – typically with the help of a dietician.
Now if we are thinking about pet food, how is this related?
When we talk about commercially available pet food, we are able to formulate diets that are complete and balanced based on AAFCO and/or FEDIAF nutrient profiles for specific lifestages, meaning they provide all the nutrition necessary for a 24 hour period in the correct levels and ratios needed to maintain health.
To do this, we need to use fortification, and this may also include synthetic vitamins and minerals to fill unavoidable gaps. It’s got little to do with processing – while cooking does sometimes cause a loss in some nutrients, this is accounted for in formulation and by adjusting the cooking method, time and temperature. Gaps are generally the result of the inability to obtain the right levels of nutrients from nature, or to ensure the correct ratio of nutrients is provided by the diet.
So yes, even if you were to feed a “fresh” diet, you still need to include synthetic vitamins and the ingredients likely already contain synthetic or biofortified nutrients. It’s unavoidable and again, not something you want to omit from your pet’s diet, lest they become a statistic.
Comparisons between human food and kibble
Often I see people drawing comparisons with kibble and human food, stating it is ‘junk’ food purely because it’s “processed”, but this is not even close to being an apples to apples comparison.
‘Junk food’ isn’t designed to meet nutritional needs, and in human nutrition is unfortunately cheaper than most healthy, fortified alternative staples. People when consuming primarily ‘junk foods’ have a significantly higher risk of malnutrition – because these foods are not designed to combat this.
A closer comparison between human food and pet food, is something like fortified cereals; these foods are much more complete and contain higher levels of iron, B group vitamins, folic acid, magnesium and zinc through biofortification of crops, as well as the inclusion of vitamins and minerals in the formulation.
An even better comparison would be total parenteral nutrition – this is a dietician formulated liquid diet that is delivered intravenously and provides all the person’s nutritional requirements over a 24 hour period. Sure, it’s synthetic vitamins and minerals combined with the correct ratios of macronutrients (fats, carbs and protein/amino acids) but in many cases, this is what keeps disabled individuals alive and thriving when they have severe gastrointestinal disease or disorders.
As kibble is designed to provide 100% of your pet’s needs over a 24 hour period, when consumed in the correct amounts for your pet’s weight and is formulated by the veterinary equivalent of a human dietician – total parenteral nutrition is a much more helpful comparison to kibble than something like “McDonald’s”.
So before you start demonising kibble and synthetic vitamins – think about what you consume. It might not be as “natural and unprocessed” as you think.
References
Cui A, Zhang T, Xiao P, Fan Z, Wang H, Zhuang Y. Global and regional prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in population-based studies from 2000 to 2022: A pooled analysis of 7.9 million participants. Front Nutr. 2023;10:1070808. Published 2023 Mar 17. doi:10.3389/fnut.2023.1070808
https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/food-fortification
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_fortification
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biofortification
Garg, Monika; Sharma, Natasha; Sharma, Saloni; Kapoor, Payal; Kumar, Aman; Chunduri, Venkatesh; Arora, Priya (2018). “Biofortified Crops Generated by Breeding, Agronomy, and Transgenic Approaches Are Improving Lives of Millions of People around the World”. Frontiers in Nutrition. 5: 12. doi:10.3389/fnut.2018.00012. PMC 5817065. PMID 29492405.
Bonnie McClafferty & Yassir Islam, ‘Fighting the Hidden Hunger’, in TCE, (February 2008), p. 26.
Carl Pray, Robert Paarlberg, & Laurian Unnevehr, ‘Patterns of Political Response to Biofortified Varieties of Crops Produced with Different Breeding Techniques and Agronomic Traits’ Archived 2020-07-12 at the Wayback Machine, in AgBioForum, vol. 10, no. 3, (2007), p. 137.
Penelope Nestel, Howarth E. Bouis, J. V. Meenakshi, & Wolfgang Pfeiffer, ‘Biofortification of Staple Food Crops’, in The Journal of Nutrition, vol. 136, no. 4, (2006), p. 1066.