Some Pet Foods Are Secretly Vegan

Last Updated July 16, 2020

It's sad to know that most of the pet foods nowadays are almost vegan - about 15% animal protein on a generic brand all the way to 50% on a well-known brand. This means that a lot of the pet food in the market right now is mostly made from vegetables - up to 85% of it! We actually made an article awhile back that shows The Truth Behind Vegan Pets and how it is harmful for your pets, so if you are not aware of the dangers, give it a read!

What is really disappointing is that most of these pet foods are playing the system. Ever wonder why there is a dozens of ingredients listed on these pet foods? The law actually requires them to list down their ingredients in the order of highest to lowest content. This is the part where companies play the system - in order to show that a particular essential ingredient is on top of the list, they break down all the other non-essential ingredients into smaller parts, just so they would appear below on the list! For example, in order for them to show "beef" (an essential ingredient for some pet food) as their number one ingredient, they have to break down other non meat based ingredients to make their percentage smaller. This effectively puts "beef" as their number one ingredient but in reality, the rest is all vegan!

Imagine thinking that you're feeding your fur-babies pet food with mostly beef but in reality, you're actually giving them almost 80% vegetables, and only 20% beef. Most would even go to distance by substituting protein percentages by using potato or soy isolates to make the consumers think "oh this wet food has 6% protein, it must have a lot of meat" but in actuality, the pet food is just a smudge away from being a vegan diet.

Another topic that is related to these "almost vegan pet food" is vitamin additives or synthetic vitamins. These types of pet food typically smothers their food with over 20 vitamin additives. The truth is that if a pet food is properly formulated, with at least 75% real meat, they would only require about 6 vitamin additives to meet AFFCO standards. With over 20 vitamin additives, the nutrients that is contained in those pet foods are now essentially synthetic.

According to DogsNaturallyMagazine:

"Real vitamins are living complexes that contribute to other living complexes like cell repair, circulatory activities and collagen production. They coexist in food with other living complexes like enzymes and essential trace minerals and they all function synergistically.

Synthetic vitamins, the kind found in premixes, were never alive nor part of anything alive. That’s what synthetic means: it occurs nowhere in nature. Synthetic vitamins are chemicals and the body recognizes them as chemicals, just like it does any other drug. This is why vitamins and drugs are both measured in milligrams. This is also why we have something called “vitamin toxicity.

It’s virtually impossible to get too much vitamin D from sunshine or foods but dogs are harmed from vitamin D toxicity from pet foods [containing synthetic vitamin D] each and every year...”

These synthetic vitamins are way different than real vitamins that your pets should get! An example is Vitamin D - this vitamin is essentially present with sunlight and in some real foods, and your dog cannot get vitamin D toxicity from this. The only way your dog can get vitamin D toxicity is through pet foods that added a lot of vitamin D substitutes in order to get the nutrient list buffered.

This is why we mentioned how we are sad about this phenomenon that is currently happening to what we feed our pets. In order to get the most important ingredient on the top of the nutrient list, companies opt to game the system by being clever about their other ingredients. This then cascades to them using a lot of synthetic vitamins to boost the nutrient count of the pet food. All of these ultimately benefits the producers and not the consumers, our fur-babies.

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