Here I go again – harping on the whole pet food conversation. I just heard my mom talking to a friend about a nice powdered CBD product she bought for her dog, Vinnie. And my mom thought, “wow…. Interesting. It’s a powdered product?” I could see her wheels turning and I watched as she immediately went to the computer to get a closer look at the ingredients.
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The label looked great.
It’s organic.
AND it’s made in Oregon.
They even have the testing profiles so we know it’s not contaminated.
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But then I saw the furrow on my Mom’s face, the one between her eyes that tells me something didn’t pass HER sniff test.
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The rest of the ingredients…
included Dextrin and polysorbate.
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Now I’m just a dog and I honestly don’t know what those are. I don’t know if they’re safe for Vinnie or me or not, but I know that my Mom will always go the extra mile for me.
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The next thing she did was this: She looked up the connection between those two ingredients and leaky gut! Ruh-Roh. It turns out that there IS a connection, one that’s even documented in the peer reviewed literature! (Mom says that means even western medical professionals know the link between polysorbate and leaky gut!)
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So, I’m not sure what the company was thinking when they mixed those things together. And as a dog, I’m kind of the end consumer, and I’m at the mercy of what my family buys for me. But when I hear my mom go ape s%^* about these things, now I understand why she is so picky about reading labels.
All the time, I hear her reviewing supplement labels with her clients. And apparently there are a whole bunch of supplements that have great active ingredients. But then she reads the inactive ingredients to my dog friends’ families! And this is where it gets bad! This is where all the good stuff is ruined by the bad stuff. These companies are putting artificial flavors, natural flavors, coloring‘s and stuff in with these supplements.
(I think they’re trying to disguise the flavor.)
These are herbs, man! They taste like, well, herbs. Kind of like grass sometimes. Sometimes it’s different.
I guess maybe I’m not so picky when it comes to food. And even if my food has some kind of these funny tasting herbs in it, I’m gonna eat it up quickly because I have multiple brothers and sisters who will be happy to steal it from me if I don’t eat it first.
Not trying to be a breedist, but we’ve babysat for those “little white dogs“ before. Some of those dogs can be picky! I think they are remembering when they used to lay at the end of the emperor’s bed in ancient Asia. And they were pampered and worshiped and hand fed. That’s OK, I’m happy to eat their food and their herbs for them. More for me.
So I don’t know how to pass the message on all of my dog friends’ people. But you gotta read the labels! The WHOLE label…
And if you don’t know what an ingredient is, all of you are carrying around that little handheld encyclopedia device, I think you call it a cell phone, look up the ingredients. Better yet, look up whether or not those weird words actually have health benefits or are detrimental to my health! Vinnie’s mom is super happy to understand what the ingredients are in that powder. And they are going to use something else to help Vinnie.