You may have heard some grain-based pet food ingredients like peas, lentils, and legumes carry anti-nutrient factors (ANFs) that interfere with a pet’s ability to absorb essential nutrients. But did you know there are tried-and-true methods of mitigating ANFs during processing? Tune in to hear from Kansas State University Professor, Dr. Julia Pezzali and the BSM Partners Research Team as they break down the science behind ANFs, pet food formulation, and how common pet food manufacturing processes can help industry professionals address this issue.

Helpful Links

BSM Partners' digestibility research: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/six-month-study-found-both-grain-inclusive-and-grain-free-canine-diets-had-no-negative-effect-on-digestibility-301914014.html

Want to learn more about prebiotic fiber in pet food? We have you covered: https://bsmpartners.net/insights/prebiotics-in-pet-food/

Recent vitamin D recalls in pet foods: https://www.fda.gov/animal-veterinary/animal-health-literacy/vitamin-d-toxicity-dogs#:~:text=Food%20Complaint.-,Dog%20Food%20Products%20Recalled%20for%20Excessive%20Vitamin%20D,-In%20February%202023

Show Notes

00:00 – Introduction

03:15 – Demystifying the Kibble-Making Process

05:28 – What a Pet Food Ingredient List Can (And Can’t) Tell You

07:52 – What in the World is an Anti-Nutrient Factor (ANF)?

11:25 – Why Not Just Avoid Ingredients with ANFs?

12:15 – How BSM Partners Designed Diets for This Study

12:58 – The Sampling Process: Good Things Come in Three’s

15:40 – The Cost of Research Can Be a Challenge

18:31 – Which ANFs Did BSM Partners Test For?

19:02 – Mycotoxins and Biogenic Amines

20:36 – The Scoop of Fiber: A Blessing or a Curse?

25:22 – But What About Digestibility?

27:36 – The Value of Testing Raw Pet Food Ingredients

30:22 – Advice from Board-Certified PhD Animal Nutritionists

32:06 – Advice from a Veterinary Expert

33:51 – Putting the Pet Food Puzzle Together

35:21 – Certified True: The Stamp of Excellence

37:05 – Dr. Clark Breaks Down Key Takeaways from The Episode

38:53 – Conclusion and Farewell

Jordan Tyler: A complete and balanced diet for pets can be made up of a variety of ingredients to achieve the essential nutrients they need to live and thrive. While it may seem simple, especially for those that dabble in home-cooked diets, there's actually a lot of science and expertise that goes into the process, from formulation to manufacturing, all the way through to the logistics of getting it to a pet's bowl.

In recent years, some have questioned whether certain ingredients could interfere with a pet's ability to get the nutrients they need from a diet. For example, while pulse ingredients such as peas and lentils have been used in pet foods for quite a long time, and people have been eating them for even longer, some have begun to wonder if they may have properties that would prevent a pet's body from being able to adequately absorb the nutrients.

A compound that interferes with the body's ability to absorb nutrients is called an anti-nutrient factor. Interesting term, right? Well, our team at BSM Partners is all about researching the best nutrition and manufacturing methods for pet food. So, based on prospective research and in line with our efforts to get to the bottom of the dilated cardiomyopathy, or DCM, debacle, we've examined extrusion.

A manufacturing process involving heat, pressure, and steam that is most commonly used to produce kibble, as well as fan favorites like Cheetos, cereal, and other popular food products. We did this to see if there was a connection between levels of anti-nutrient factors and the ingredients used in formulations.

The link to this research can be found in the show notes for this episode. Today, we'll talk to members of the BSM Research team, including veterinarian, Dr. Bradley Quest, board-certified veterinary nutritionist, Dr. Renee Streeter, and two PhDs and board-certified animal nutritionists, Dr. Stephanie Clark and Dr. Sydney McCauley.

We also welcome a special guest, researcher, and assistant professor at Kansas State University for Companion Animal and Pet Food Processing, Dr. Julia Pezzali. Dr. Pezzali specializes in pet food processing technologies as well as the nutritional impacts of those technologies. At Kansas State University, her main focus is on exploring new ingredients.

Processing techniques and dietary strategies that promote sustainable innovation and, of course, the health and well-being of pets. So now that we've set the stage, let the show begin. Welcome to Barking Mad, a podcast by BSM Partners. I'm your host, Jordan Tyler.

So two of the most common questions we get as pet specialists are, one, how do I know which pet food is best for a particular pet? And, how do I know if a pet company is good? With the wide variety of pet nutrition products on the market today, these questions become central. Now, if you look at the different types of pet foods available on the market, even if you look at the kibble category alone, there is an almost overwhelming number of options.

This can make these questions really hard for a consumer to answer. So, Dr. Clark, I'd like to kick off this conversation with your insights. Could you please explain a little bit about the kibble-making process for someone who might not be familiar?

Stephanie Clark: We can start way from the beginning to the formulation part. In particular, if we're talking about this study, we had all the raw ingredients, so all the individual ingredients were tested. So we knew what the nutrients were going in and then we put it into a database, which we formulated with. And that gives us a theoretical output of where all the nutrients should be.

This is what we do in the first part of it before we actually get to our benchtop trials or even production runs. We want to make sure that we're formulating, to meet those nutrient requirements stated by AAFCO. And so with this particular one, Dr. Streeter and I worked with a couple of food scientists, making sure that these diets were well controlled for and then actually got to go to the manufacturing facility, mix all the ingredients, run it through the extruder, control all of those parameters.

And then through the dryer. Then our last step is coating. If we're comparing what normally happens versus what we did in the study, it was the exact same thing. We even used a manufacturing facility that makes kibbles that are on the market as well.

Jordan Tyler: Yeah, there certainly is a lot that goes into it. So, thanks so much. I appreciate you sharing that high level of insight to help our listeners better understand the process. Now, if you look at consumer insight research, one of the things that pet owners tend to look for on a pet food package when they're trying to decide what to buy is the ingredient list.

Dr. Streeter, this one's for you. How can a pet owner decipher a pet food ingredient list? What should they be looking for? Or what should they be mindful of?

Renee Streeter: So the ingredient list is based on weight. So, the ingredients are listed with the largest weight at the beginning and the lowest way at the end.

So your ingredients in the ingredient list all have to add up to 100%. So those ingredients that are at the top of the ingredient list could make up 70% of the formula. But if there are a lot of ingredients, they might make up 10% of the formula. It really depends on the split between each ingredient within that list of a hundred.

So very nuanced, it's very difficult to really determine how much of a nutrient is coming from each ingredient unless you happen to have a very good understanding of what those ingredients might be.

The other thing is you really can't tell the quality of ingredient based on the ingredient list. So quality might look at things like how fresh is the ingredient, Is there contamination? Are there toxins? And so those things are all not included, and really hard to tell.

But before we dive deeper into the study that BSM Partners conducted regarding these anti-nutrient factors, I'm curious, Dr. Pezzali, how would you describe anti-nutrient factors to someone who's never heard about them before?

Julia Pezzali: Yeah, that's an interesting definition, and basically, anti-nutritional factors can be specific nutrients that are metabolized, they're produced by, maybe plant bacteria or some animal proteins in the animal that can have negative effects on digestion or metabolism of the animal.

So a product with higher anti-nutritional factors, you may see a lower protein digestibility or even more serious detrimental health outcomes in the animal.

Jordan Tyler: Do you have maybe a specific example in mind?

Julia Pezzali: Yeah, if you think about soybeans, for example, raw soybeans, they have what we call an anti-nutritional factor called trypsin inhibitor. An enzyme that's going to inhibit trypsin, which is an enzyme that animals produce that's going to help digest protein.

I think it's important to mention that anti-nutritional factor is a broad term. I mentioned just one, trypsin inhibitors that are proteins. So, usually in the extrusion process, we apply a lot of heat and also there's a lot of pressure and the heat can destroy some of these anti-nutritional factors.

One that is destroyed is a trypsin inhibitor. And it's mostly destroyed because it has this protein structure and is going to modify chemically that structure that's going to inactivate trypsin inhibitor. After extrusion, we increase their quality because we're decreasing the amount of these anti-nutritional factors.

Jordan Tyler: Okay. So, essentially trypsin can help with digestion, but the anti-nutritional factor trypsin inhibitor, which is an enzyme, prevents trypsin from doing its job. So, according to Dr. Pezzali, an overabundance of trypsin inhibitors can lead to a pet not being able to digest or synthesize the protein and amino acids that they need. However, we can apply heat as an industry during processing to denature this enzyme that inhibits trypsin.

Bradley Quest: You know, when you think about it in a lot of the human foods we eat, we'll take, beans, for example. If you're going to cook raw navy beans, you typically soak them before they're actually cooked.

But we don't typically use whole beans, grains, or whole corn in that form, in pet food production, they're usually processed so that they're in smaller particle sizes. And when Dr. Pezzali was talking about applying the heat, when you actually decrease the side of the seed or the pea, it actually makes that heat more applicable or has more chance to actually have that thermal effect. And then in addition, we think about when we cook a lot of these things, we're applying hot water and in some cases boiling them, which creates steam. So we'll add steam in the extrusion process that helps to accelerate that process.

Jordan Tyler: Yeah, I think those are great explanations. So thank you for that. Dr. McCauley, this next question is for you. Even though we know certain ingredients have these anti-nutrient factors, Why do we continue to use them in pet food formulations? Why not just avoid them?

Sydney McCauley: Well, if you think about it, what are we left with? We're left with essentially kind of a whole lot of nothing, right? Everything is going to have, you know, those anti-nutrient factors, but, you know, we're doing all of these processes to mitigate a lot of these anti-nutrient factor problems that we're having with these ingredients.

Jordan Tyler: Yeah, it sounds to me like we really do have all these great ways to reduce anti-nutrient factors in order to optimize digestibility.

And we'll come back to the digestibility piece a little later. First, Dr. Streeter, when it came to designing the diets for this particular study; tell us a little bit about what that process looked like.

Renee Streeter: Well, we were trying to make diets that were representative of what we might find on the market while still maintaining almost exactly the same macronutrient and mostly micronutrient composition throughout as well. So we had grain-free diets that were high in animal protein and grain-free diets that were low in animal protein. And then we had grain-free diets that were vice versa, right? High and low.

So that's what we were really aiming for was to try to reduce any variability that we might see due to actual nutrient differences between the diets.

Jordan Tyler: So, now we've made these diets, and we want to test for the anti-nutrient factors. This requires samples to be taken, and I'm super curious about the sampling process. Dr. Clark, I know you took quite a few, so would you mind explaining a little more about how you determine the best sampling method to use here?

Stephanie Clark: Yeah, and that really always comes down to study design. And we've previously discussed the cooking process, the heat, the steam, the pressure, and how that can potentially degrade the anti-nutrient factors.

But no one really knew what process, so we wanted to follow it throughout the processing. So when we mixed all of our dry, raw ingredients, we took a sample there. Instead of just scooping a big scoop off the top or from one bag, we decided on three random areas of the mix or three bags, and then we ran triplicates on those, just to make sure if we had an outlier.

Then that flour got mixed in with everything, and it went through what is called a preconditioner phase. And again, throughout this run, you've got a couple of thousand pounds running through there, and instead of just collecting what's first coming out, we did a beginning, a middle, and an end to try and get an average, and then triplicates of those through the preconditioner and went through the extruder. And we did the exact same thing again there. Through there, it went through the dryer tunnel, collecting three samples and then in triplicates. So, through the dryer, and then in the coating, and essentially the finished product. Um, because at that point, it's getting ready to bag.

So we collected all those samples, We ran them in triplicates and they were sent off for complete AAFCO testing through a third-party laboratory. They are not cheap. So we really were trying to make sure that we could figure out if we were seeing anything to make sure that our replicates were there instead of just a one-and-done and, and hope it was representative.

We also did a lot of particular anti-nutrient testing and we worked with a few universities to get this testing done because they're not super common to test for all the anti-nutrient factors on every single diet. So, we did have to do a little bit of groundwork on what universities and what laboratories

do all of the anti-nutrient factor testing. A lot of samples, Dr. Quest and I were able to go and actually collect the samples and really watch the whole process and control for all four diets that were running through that.

Jordan Tyler: Let's pause here just to acknowledge some key points so far. So, Dr. Clark talked a bit about research expenses, and she's absolutely right. We hear a lot from the nutrition community about how much just one sample costs. For example, fiber testing alone was $500 per sample. I just think it's wonderful having experts in various areas at BSM Partners work on this paper together to achieve the exhaustive sampling that took place here.

So, Dr. Pezzali, in your research experience, what are your thoughts about these samples and having access to a manufacturing facility?

Julia Pezzali: It's very expensive to conduct an animal study and also to produce diets that are representative of the ones that we see in the market. Most outside universities, when you think about pet nutrition, look more into what's happened in the animal, but what's happening during the processing is very important as well.

And sometimes we lack replication to be able to really get to a conclusion and to understand if that's going to be replicated in a real-world setting. So getting those samples at different time points and throughout different parts of the processing is very important to understand where and how is the effect of the processing on those anti-nutritional factors, but also on the nutrients that we want to provide to the animals.

Jordan Tyler: Dr. Quest, I know you were also a big part of the sampling process. Would you like to tell us a little about your experience?

Bradley Quest: When you start talking about the sampling process and then the cost of that, those are really two main reasons why a lot of folks that do research or that are just making diets for just general production. The cost of this study alone, is over 50 times the cost of testing ingredients as we did to actually make the diets.

And that includes the cost of all the raw ingredients. It includes the cost of the use of the manufacturing facility, the labor involved with that, and everything. Just an AAFCO nutrient profile in and of itself per sample costs over $3,000 at a reference lab. As Dr. Clark said, we pulled it from multiple samples in the process, and three times when Dr. Clark says triplicates, that wasn't just one sample pulled at that time point. There were three. We spent a lot of money doing testing, but it was super important because we wanted to know exactly the nutritional values and how the process can affect those as we talk about the anti-nutrient factors.

We want to make sure that they're not present or if they are present, they're in very low amounts. We want to make sure that the required nutrients are there in the finished product or in the food that we're actually feeding to the dogs.

Jordan Tyler: Absolutely. And getting just a little bit more specific, Dr. Streeter, which anti-nutrient factors were we testing for here?

Renee Streeter: We checked for a variety of anti-nutrient factors. Sometimes we think of heavy metals as anti-nutrient factors, so we checked for heavy metals. We checked for mycotoxins as well we also checked for biogenic amines, then the other things that we looked at are things like phytic acid or lignin.

Jordan Tyler: I did notice in the study results that mycotoxins and biogenic amines were different among the diets. So, Dr. Quest, can you explain some of those differences and why they may have occurred?

Bradley Quest: Dr. Streeter alluded to biogenic amines sometimes because of varying factors. It could be the age of the individual raw ingredients.

It could be how they were processed. It can be, even in the finished product, how they're stored and handled after the diet or the dog food is actually made. But those biogenic amines can cause potential health problems. If at certain amounts, typically we'll see those in diets that have higher meat inclusions.

In other words, more of the diet is made up of meat ingredients, and we would hypothesize, or we would think that diets that are higher in animal protein or meat protein could potentially show higher levels of biogenic amines. When you look at some of the other anti-nutrient factors, there are some of those that we've talked about here that could be more prevalent in, say, an ingredient like peas or lentils or chickpeas.

When you talk about some of the mycotoxins, there are some grains and some crop ingredients that historically might be higher, and there really weren't a lot of surprises. What we saw there depended on the ingredient, depending on the anti-nutrient factor, for the most part, what we saw in our results is a lot of what we expected.

So let me just break that down for you really quick. In a nutshell, there are two types of dietary fiber in our diets as well as our pets' diets. Soluble fiber is, well, soluble in water. Think of Metamucil. This type of fiber will draw water into the GI tract and this can be helpful for constipation as it slows down digestion and absorption of nutrients.

A few examples of foods with soluble fiber are oats, beans, lentils, and nuts. Now, on the other hand, insoluble fiber is not soluble in water and is what we call roughage. This builds bulk into the stool as it remains relatively unchanged as it travels through the GI tract. Some examples of insoluble fiber are whole wheat or whole grains, as well as vegetables.

When you look at the results from the study that we've been discussing, we actually didn't see differences in soluble fiber across the diets, whether they were grain-free or grain-inclusive. I think that's really interesting. So, Dr. Clark, would you mind elaborating on those results?

And so when you typically look at pet food, you'll see a crude fiber percentage on the guaranteed analysis. However, we wanted to look at dietary fiber, and this included, as you had mentioned, the soluble and the insoluble fiber. So like we had talked about, the soluble fibers, are going to draw water into the gut, but they can also slow down digestion.

But those are also the prebiotic fibers that we like to add to pet food that feed our good bacteria in the gut. We noted in the study that there was a decrease in microbiome diversity in some diets, which is typically referred to as not favorable. However, it was accompanied by an increase in beneficial bacteria.

Which is typically a good thing. So that makes you wonder if fiber is an anti-nutrient factor or a pro-nutrient factor. So we also thought maybe we would see differences in dietary fiber based on pulse ingredients versus grains, just naturally. However, really interestingly, We didn't see a big difference, at least not statistically.

And we also didn't see a huge difference in digestion when we were looking at the digestibility of the four diets. However, more importantly, we didn't see a negative impact on nutrient uptake. We'll talk about this in a future podcast episode once the paper is published. But we actually followed nutrient uptake and not just digestibility.

And what we found was nutrients were not being affected. So it kind of raises a couple of questions. Can you use different ingredients but still control the nutrients? And that's one thing we did for this study, is we didn't really focus too heavily on ingredients, but really controlling those nutrients.

If the body is getting the same nutrients or similar nutrients, can we get similar results? And we had a diet that was very high in pulses and a diet that was very high in grains and somewhere a little bit more middle of the road. And yet the fiber was not statistically different. It definitely wasn't what I was expecting based on what you hear and nutrition you see.

But research is interesting like that. When you start controlling for different factors, And how those different factors affect the end result.

Jordan Tyler: Right, yeah. I can understand why you wanted to be able to control these things in the study, including the nutrients and how the diets were formulated. It just gives you a lot more confidence when you're interpreting your results.

Now, shifting gears just a little bit, another DCM study by BSM Partners, which is also linked in the show notes, found that the digestibility of these test diets were also very similar. So, Dr. McCauley, would you care to elaborate on that at all or add anything?

Sydney McCauley: I do want to make note that what we produced, and we did this anti-nutrient factor study on are the same diets that we fed to the dogs. So what we are seeing with these results were the same that we fed to the dogs to do the digestibility study and all of our other studies that we have published in our publishing.

Jordan Tyler: Yeah, and that's important to note because again when we're thinking about anti-nutrient factors, a lot of the time we're talking about whether the nutrients are absorbable and digestible.

Like is the animal getting them? Dr. Pezzali, I know you talked about how much of your research looks at what's happened inside the animal's body. So, do you have any thoughts about this digestibility aspect?

Julia Pezzali: Yeah, I think digestibility is apparent through our track is a very good applied measurement for the industry. But if you want to really understand what's affecting their metabolism and health at the end, we need to understand, are they really absorbing that specific amino acid and how is it being utilized for a specific biological function? It's always important to also go a step further and analyze some metabolites in the blood.

And one thought about the anti-nutritional factors, I think, is important to mention that some we can control with raw material quality that was mentioned here, mycotoxin, biogenic amines, and heavy metals. We can analyze the ingredients coming in and depending on the quality, we can accept it or not.

Some we cannot control, such as those trypsin inhibitors that are coming with the ingredients. That one is not that ingredient has a bad quality, but that it is very complex and broad term and some we can't control. So we're going to come naturally and we have to do our job to understand why they're bringing in when we are formulating those diets.

Jordan Tyler: Again, lots of expertise, lots of steps to consider here.

Bradley Quest: I'd like to jump in on something Dr. Pezzali said that I think is super important. There are a lot of things we can control in pet food manufacturing by testing our raw ingredients before we actually mix them and go through the extrusion process.

That was part of what we did to try to ensure that we weren't starting with ingredients that had high mycotoxin levels or had existing biogenic amine levels that would be unacceptable. Or might the fat sources could be oxidized? In other words, they could be starting to be going bad before we even use them.

So we did a lot of testing of all the individual ingredients before we even made the diets to try to ensure that we started with the highest quality raw ingredients we could.

Jordan Tyler: But that's a great point because if you're not measuring at the beginning, it could really mess up your results. So we really were testing the whole way through so that we could interpret each outcome.

Speaking of testing raw ingredients. Obviously, it's important to test for anti-nutrient factors, right? But shouldn't all pet food ingredients be tested before being incorporated into a diet? The reason I bring this up is our listeners may have seen another vitamin D recall in the news recently, and this is nothing new.

Vitamin D has been recalled pretty widely over the last several years in both dry and wet pet food formulations, and by pretty large pet food manufacturers like Hills, Purina, and a sizable co-manufacturer as well. According to the FDA, excessive vitamin D, or what's referred to as vitamin D toxicity, can lead to kidney failure and even death in dogs.

So if we're worried about anti-nutrient factors, shouldn't we also be worried about making sure we aren't including too much of other ingredients, such as vitamin D, which could actually, in excess, be fatal? I think so. Now, we started this conversation with questions, how do I find the right diet for my pet, and how do I know if a pet company is good?

Well, a lot of this comes from a concern around types of ingredients. But, with what our research showed, the notion that an issue is due to a grain-free or grain-inclusive ingredient just isn't making a lot of sense. As we dig into this study, where there were both grain-free and grain-inclusive diets, and they both performed well for fiber and digestibility, it just feels like the FDA jumped the gun in the way they decided to go about sharing this information with the public.

So back to the, what do I feed my pet question, we know there's a lot of crucial information that you just can't get from that ingredient list, right? We've already talked about that a little. But along this train of thought, Dr. McCauley, what do you think, how can you decide the right food for your pet, whether a company is good or not, and I guess how would you help guide people in the right direction?

Sydney McCauley: As a team, we get it all the time when they hear, when any of us hear, "Oh, you're a pet food consultant. Do you feed your pet?" Or what do you recommend? But I think one of the biggest things that we always recommend for anybody asking is like, do they test their products? Do they test full AAFCOs? Or what do they test?

And like reaching out to those manufacturers or those brands and asking them for that information. And you hope that they are very open with you about it. Or like, "Yes, we do test it. Here it is. Or, hey, you know, this is what we have." And the digestibility part, which, I know it's applied, but sometimes that's what we can do. And that's what we can afford or that is what is most feasible without extensive protocols.

Stephanie Clark: I would say another thing from a clinical standpoint is, and Dr. McCauley touched on this a little bit, is dogs are all individual. We lump them together and we say, you know, what is the best diet for dogs? but they are individual.

Just like humans, some of us can eat gluten, and some of us can't eat gluten, and what is right for one dog may not be appropriate for the other dog. So really understand that they are just as individualized as humans are.

Jordan Tyler: Those are all very good points. And Dr. Quest, I was thinking, part of what you do is actually helping with consumer support.

So, if a pet owner calls and has questions or concerns about a product, you're able to walk a lot of them through those questions. So I'm curious about your perspective here too. Is there anything you might want to add?

Bradley Quest: Those are all really great questions and, you know, we know, Being in the pet food industry, there's a lot of choices and there's a lot of great, in fact, the vast majority of the products on the market are really great products, you know, to build a little bit on what Dr. Pezzali alluded to earlier. And what Dr. McCauley was saying too, we've talked a lot about here's how we formulated diets, how we tested for nutrients or anti-nutrient factors in these diets. One thing I always tell folks when they're asking about a specific diet or what diet we feed is, and we actually do this for a lot of the pet food clients that we do work for, we highly recommend that they actually do feeding performance studies with those diets and those can be we had mentioned digestibility studies, which is a good measure to have. There are AAFCO feeding studies and we do those for our pet food clients too, but we try to look at more things and Dr. Pezzali had talked about amino acids, that's one thing that we highly recommend when we do AAFCO feeding studies, with branded or pet food diets that you can buy on the market. We look at things like that because we want to see bioabsorption to be broken down and in a fashion that the pet can actually use them.

But the bottom line, what I tell folks is if you have questions about the diet, call the manufacturer and ask them if they do feeding studies. And if they do feeding studies, can they share those results with you?

Jordan Tyler: It sounds to me like the resounding theme here is just the many moving parts of making quality pet food.

And when it comes to the nutrition side of things, I think of pet food formulas as a complex matrix of ingredients. Kind of like a big puzzle made up of many pieces. It's about more than the ingredients. It also has to do with the individual nutrients required for pets to live and thrive and how those nutrients interact with each other inside the pet's body.

So, taking this perspective, Dr. Streeter, I'm curious, what's important to make sure a pet gets the right nutrients from a diet? We want to ensure

Renee Streeter: We want to ensure that the diet is calculated to meet all nutrient requirements, not just the nutrient requirements, but all the other wonderful nutrients that make a pet healthful.

This could be board-certified veterinary nutritionists. It could be a PhD animal nutritionist, and these people are trained in how to create these diets that really ensure nutritional adequacy, but also excellency.

Jordan Tyler: Yeah, it's so important to have nutritionists on board, both PhD nutritionists and board-certified veterinary nutritionists.

They can make sure that a diet is appropriately complete and balanced for a particular pet. But that doesn't always answer the question, is a company good or not? So there is an emerging program that BSM Partners is proud to support called Certified True, which will essentially provide third-party certified testing for all sorts of pet food claims.

And I just know that when it comes out, it's going to be really, really helpful for pet owners looking to answer this question. But, Dr. Clark, do you want to talk a little bit about the Certified True program and maybe what it means to you?

Stephanie Clark: I like to think of Certified True as the stamp of excellence.

There's a lot of different questionnaires out there about what we should be asking brands. What we should be asking manufacturers and what we should be asking our vets or even people in the retail store, there's really not a good standard across the board for making sure that brands are doing digestibility testing or doing testing on finished products or quality of products of the raw material that are coming in.

And so regulatory and audits make sure that the manufacturing plants are safe and up to code. And so Certified True, in a nutshell, And the first step is covering all of that and really making sure that they're delivering excellence to pets. The program includes a stamp and a QR code where you can go and dive deeper into all of the different audits and testing and even the frequency of testing. So the pet owner can really feel comfortable and confident when they're picking up a bag off the shelf and getting ready to feed it to their cat or dog.

Jordan Tyler: We'll be sure to keep you posted as we learn more about this new program, so stay tuned. As we wrap this episode up, Dr. Clark, I have one final question for you.

What would you say are the main takeaways here for our pet owners out there listening? What should they walk away with from this episode and this research paper?

Stephanie Clark: I think first is testing, understanding the ingredients that are going into pet food and the quality of those, making sure that the process of producing this pet food is done appropriately, that it is being controlled for, time, temperature, pressure, and really having qualified individuals.

it takes a team, right? You can't just isolate it to you have to have a nutritionist or you have to have a food scientist, we have to work together. it may look great on paper to a nutritionist, but it may not be able to go through the extruder and that's where that food scientist is just as important.

And then another key takeaway is these anti-nutrient factors that we are concerned with, a lot of them can be controlled through processing, appropriate processing. And then third high levels of pulses, high levels of animal protein, low animal protein grains, we all saw them as very, very highly digestible.

Again, digestibility, it's something we use very commonly in pet food. We have an average percentage that we're looking for, and if we go back to that arbitrary standard, these diets were well above. Again, tying in nutritionists and food scientists working together in harmony to create a very highly digestible, safe diet.

Jordan Tyler: Thank you so much, Dr. Clark. I mean, I think that wraps up today's episode pretty perfectly, but just to recap. One ingredient is all good or all bad, like most things in life, they each come with pros and cons. Certain ingredients inherently have anti-nutrient factors, but that doesn't mean there aren't steps we can take in processing to reduce their presence in a finished pet food.

We can mitigate them by considering the quality of the ingredients and applying heat, such as in the extrusion process. So, when evaluating raw ingredients for a particular species or a particular formulation, we also need to consider storage and processing factors to truly understand how the ingredient will perform.

Additionally, as Dr. Clark pointed out, taking a pet food formulation from concept through creation takes a village. And formulators, nutritionists, and food scientists all must have a seat at this table to ensure our furry companions are getting the very best. When in doubt, lean in on the research.

By studying these nuances, we can better understand the best nutrition for pets through ingredients and formulas. Lastly, having a well-qualified team is critically necessary when making pet food. It's not enough to just have a nutritionist or just have a food scientist. We must have both to formulate a stellar diet that checks all the boxes.

Thank you for joining us on Barking Mad, a podcast by BSM Partners. If you want to learn more about our work, please visit us at www. bsmpartners. net. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and share it with a friend or family. to stay current on the latest pet industry trends and conversations.

We'd also like to thank our dedicated writing team, Ada-Miette Thomas, Neeley Bowden, Paige Lanier, and Dr. Katy Miller. A special thanks to Dr. Julia Pezzali for lending her valuable expertise to this episode. See you next time!