Walking up the street, you will find more and more people going out with pets, especially young people, and this trend is beginning to become popular in China's first- and second-tier cities. But when it comes to raising pets, not everyone can afford to keep them, it is the same as raising children, eating and drinking Lasa must be taken care of in place, a little mistake, the result will always make the shovelers bald.
Recently, a cat slave friend of mine who has a deep understanding of this matter has been complaining a lot. Because his cat was recently diagnosed with ibd (inflammatory enteritis), it was a pity.
The cat was diagnosed with pancreatitis (non-acute) many months earlier, and not long after, liver indicators were found to be abnormal during the physical examination. Recently, the cat was constipated again, its intestinal tissue was inflamed, and the intestinal peristalsis ability decreased, resulting in constipation, and finally diagnosed inflammatory enteritis IBD. I had reminded him that there was something wrong with whether he was eating canned food, and he could try it with another brand first, or make some for him to eat, but he didn't think that this lesson was too great.
Why is there such an emphasis on the possibility that there may be a problem with the canned food?
That's because over the decades, veterinarians have found that pets experience an increasing number of chronic digestive diseases. Many doctors believe that the commercial pet food that is now popular is inextricably linked to such diseases. In other countries, this is not the case in areas where pet food is not fed much. There, viruses and parasites are the main causes of digestive inflammation, and now, the number one problem faced by shovelers and cat doctors is chronic digestive disease.
Among them, scientists have found that carrageenan, as a common raw material for pet feed, is "indispensable" in inducing inflammatory enteritis.
What exactly is carrageenan?
In fact, it is a commonly used additive in canned pet food, and the source is a red seaweed plant. As a shoveler, you know that a cat can contains about 78% of the water, two-thirds of which is water. If you open the can and find a puddle of water floating on it, do you still buy this product? At this time, manufacturers will use carrageenan to mold and homogenize the material, so that they will not open a bag of water. Therefore, some cans will also directly add seaweed, which is also the same reason.
Carrageenan producers, animal nutritionists, and pet food manufacturers must have asserted in front of you more than once: non-degradable carrageenan for food additives is fine, and there is certainly no harm in pets ingesting this thing. However, there are no absolutes in everything, and what they don't tell you is that the research on the harmlessness of these carrageenans is very old, when the scientific community did not find such a frequent and widespread problem of inflammation of the digestive system, and scientists at the time did not know much about the complexity of the gut immune system.
With the advancement of science, there is more and more evidence that the addition of carrageenan interferes with or even changes the balance of intestinal digestive bacteria, and has the potential to peel off the protective layer of the mucosa inside the intestine. Peeling off the protective layer will make food raw materials and bacteria intimately contact with intestinal immune cells, forcing the immune system to make more aggressive responses and more likely to produce immune system disorders. The chance of inflammatory enteritis in cats naturally increases.
Over the past few decades, researchers have successfully demonstrated the damage and risks of food-grade carrageenan (undegraded) in many ways. Animal experiments by scientists have shown that food-grade carrageenan causes gastrointestinal inflammation and higher frequency of intestinal damage, ulcers, and even malignancies. So far, there are about 3855 scientific papers worldwide showing that carrageenan causes inflammation and carcinogenic risks.
An associate professor at the University of Illinois Clinical School of Medicine in Chicago has said that eating products containing carrageenan can obviously cause inflammation, and the amount of carrageenan in food is enough to cause such inflammation, and degradable and non-degradable carrageenan will be harmful.
Of course, chronic digestive inflammation in pets can be the result of a combination of many factors, and food alone cannot be blamed. But then again, there are many factors involved in the induction of inflammatory diseases of the digestive system, even emotional personality. But as a qualified shoveler, the only thing that can be controlled is diet.
So, for shovelers, the best option at the moment is to vote with your feet, and you can choose a can without carrageenan added. However, now the vast majority of canned food on the market has added carrageenan, we can make it ourselves, homemade pet food is the best way to avoid unknown raw materials, to ensure quality, there is no one.
For the health of their pets, but also for their own sake, hurry up and act.