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Meat verse Meals

tony

Posted : 4/5/2006 4:41:48 PM

I was reading Dr. Wysongs take on meat vs. meals and found it interesting.

Fresh Meat Vs. Meat Meals
Let#%92s examine the currently popular argument that dried meat meals are superior to fresh meats using the logic of nature as the preeminent principle. It is claimed that if dried meat meal is used in dry pet foods, then more actual meat can be included than if fresh meat were used, which is 70% water. However, meat meal proponents cry foul because fresh meat users can list meat higher on the ingredient list, because ingredient order is by weight. Thus, fresh meat users get to include the 70% water factor as meat. Dried meat products may have more meat, but it will look like less on the label compared to foods using fresh meat. This seems like a reasonable complaint at first glance, but one must also consider the nutrient value of meat meal.
Let#%92s use archetypal genetic context (the logic of nature) for a second glance.
If the number one goal in pet feeding is the weight of meat, why buy dried pet foods at all? Dried manufactured foods (except ArchetypeTM) require starches to form a nugget through extrusion processing. They are thus diluted by grains whether fresh or dried meats are used. Purchasing fresh meats from the grocery store obviously better achieves this high meat goal. It#%92s 100% meat.
However, if dried foods are used because of their convenience, then should the goal be to find the food with the highest amount of meat on a weight basis, or to find a food with the highest quality and most nutrient dense form of meat? As long as basic caloric and protein needs are met – which essentially all commercial foods do – the most important nutritional consideration becomes nutritional quality with the objective of immune system enhancement to slow aging and stave off chronic degenerative diseases.
Put simply, meat meals are inferior to fresh meats. Meals are made through grinding, cooking, and then drying meats into a granular powder. This task is performed by processors, apart from the pet food plant. The meals are then binned, stored, and trucked to the pet food manufacturer. The pet food manufacturer then stores the ingredient in bins until added to the formula. It is then cooked again during pet food processing, dried again and then put into its final package and stored some more.
On the other hand, fresh meats are not precooked and stored, but only cooked once into the final pet food product. Do we not intuitively know that a fresh steak would be much better for us than a beef patty made from precooked, powdered meat stored in a package and then cooked again? Freshness is as fundamental to nutrition as gasoline is to an automobile. Science confirms this intuition. Heat, exposure to air and light, and age, are all the enemies of nutritional value. Meat meals bathe in these vitiations. Fats are oxidized creating dangerous free-radicals (not entirely solved by adding preservatives), proteins combine with carbohydrates in Maillard reactions to form toxic end products, nutrients are leached and lost, amino acids are diminished (e.g. arginine, taurine) and converted to D-stereoisomers, rendering them unavailable to the body.
This only begins the list of destruction processing can do. The trick is to do the least possible, not process twice as occurs with the use of meat meals. There is little merit in arguing that you own a new Mercedes if in reality it has been totaled and then rebuilt from used parts. Using fresh meats in pet foods puts a dent in the fender of nutrition, using meat meals puts it in the junkyard. Quality is the key, not quantity. Coincidentally, manufacturers who criticize the use of fresh meat do not have fresh meat processing capabilities. This capability is extremely expensive and very labor intensive. We would not do it at Wysong if we did not believe it enhanced the nutritional value of our foods. It would hardly be a cost-effective way of just playing games with labels

dyan

Posted : 4/5/2006 5:52:21 PM

[font=arial][size=2]Let#%92s examine the currently popular argument that dried meat meals are superior to fresh meats using the logic of nature as the preeminent principle

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I'm not sure that I understand this personally. Mainly because I can't remember ever hearing someone say that dried meat meal is better than fresh meat. I have read a thousand times that meat meal is better than meat, but that is in the ingredient list of kibble, not compared to fresh meat.

tony

Posted : 4/5/2006 6:52:21 PM

I believe he is talking about using a meat as opposed to meat meal in a kibble, in Wysong Kibble they don't use any meals just meat in there kibbles.

Here is another comment.

Wysong also uses fresh meats because it creates a more wholesome, healthful and nutritious end product than if just pre-rendered meat meals were used. The incorporation of[linkhttp://www.wysong.net/controversies/fresh_meats_vs.shtml] fresh meats[/link] into Wysong products is an extremely expensive, technically difficult and laborious process. It increases the cost of production and requires specialized equipment including refrigeration and frozen storage capabilities. On the other hand, using simply a dry, pre-rendered meat is inexpensive, easy to do, and requires no specialized equipment or storage facilities. Consider that pre-rendered meat has been cooked, dried, stored and transported to the manufacturer. The manufacturer then holds this dried meat product in open bins exposed to air and then mixes it with ground grains, cooks it again and extrudes into finished nuggets. It is the cheap, high production rate and convenient way to use meat in pet foods. But if meats and fats are cooked, dried and then stored for indefinite periods of time exposed to light and oxygen, they
greatly degrade in nutritional value and generate toxins. Then, if this already cooked, dried, and aged product is again cooked and dried into a finished pet food, as is done by manufacturers who use pre-rendered meats, a
nutritionally depleted food results as compared to a once-cooked, fresh meat food. (A step even beyond that are Wysong#%92s Archetype diets containing meats that have not been cooked at all!)
Consumers should be aware that those who use pre-rendered meats as the sole meat source and then again cook it into a final product greatly sacrifice nutritional value in the interest of cost savings and manufacturing ease and simplicity.

amylu

Posted : 4/6/2006 9:54:30 AM

I agree. Completely. The processing of meat into a meal form cooks the life out of it--literally. It cooks all the nutrients out of it. I used to be impressed by the long list of vitamins and minerals that were added to the dog foods. But, now that I know more about how they process the food, I know that they have to add all those vitamins and minerals because there are none left after the processing gets thru with it. If they didn't add in nutrients at the end of the process, it would be just like eating cardboard...maybe a little better tasting, but with the same nutritional value.

papillon806

Posted : 4/6/2006 12:47:04 PM

That's not true at all....the meat meals don't contribute vitamins and minerals (hence why it's added at the end). The purpose of the meat meals is to provide essential amino acids, which are NOT ruined in the extrusion process....this study may interest you:

The effects of moist extrusion processing of diets containing fish meal (FM) and conventional defatted soybean meal (SBM) or untoasted defatted soybean meal (white flakes [WF]) on amino acid composition, trypsin inhibitor activity (TIA), and apparent total tract digestibility of nutrients were studied. Three diets with the nutritional characteristics of feeds for salmonid fish were formulated: one control based on FM as protein source and two others where 40% of total amino acids from FM were substituted by either SBM or WF. Each diet was fed to mink either as an unextruded mixture of the ingredients or as extruded pellets in order to determine the effect of extrusion processing. Extrusion did not change the amino acid composition of the diets significantly, but reduced the TIA of both diets containing soy products by approximately 76%. Intake of the unextruded WF diet was only one-third compared with the other diets. The dry matter concentration in faeces from mink fed diets containing soy products was significantly lower than in mink fed the FM diet. Digestibility of crude protein, all amino acids and fat was lower, but starch higher, in the unextruded WF diet than in the FM and SBM diets, whereas no significant differences were found among the extruded diets. Extrusion of the WF diet increased digestibility of protein and all amino acids. The greatest increase in digestibility after extrusion of the WF diet was observed for cysteine followed by tryptophan. Extrusion of the FM and SBM diets had no significant effect on amino acid digestibility. Digestibility of starch was, in general, increased by extrusion. It is concluded that the heat treatment involved in typical moist extrusion processing used for fish feed may be sufficient to inactivate most of the TIA in unheated soybean meal, and to increase digestibility of the protein in WF to approximately the same level as found for SBM and FM. Still, extrusion is a lenient process with minor effects on nutrient... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ron2

Posted : 4/6/2006 2:47:14 PM

Excellent article, Papillon. I had also read somewhere (now I have to find the resource again) that the difference between cooked and uncooked meat is not huge and is easily compensated for in the whole process. I believe most companies pre-load the mix of nutrients before extrusion. Then, qc checks nutrient levels in the end product, to make sure, at least at companies that have good qc.