What Do We Really Know About Alternative and Raw Diets?

Pet owners may choose to feed unconventional diets, such as home prepared foods, raw food and raw meat based diets, or vegetarian diets for many reasons. These include both negative feelings about commercial pet foods and positive ideas about these diets. Negative ideas about pet foods include concerns or misconceptions about ingredients, e.g. fillers, by products, road kill, carbohydrates, and concerns about toxicities. Other owners may wish to feed “ natural” or raw foods, to cook for their pet, or want to avoid a real or suspected food intolerance or allergy. Some pets either due to learned preference or illness may not be willing to eat a commercial diet.

A major problem for discussing the potential risks and benefits of unconventional and raw food based diets is the lack of good data from high quality studies. Information on nutritional risk or benefit is often from low-quality studies (testimonials, case series, or poor-quality cohort and case-controlled studies)1 . The evidence for infectious disease risks when feeding raw meat diets is of better quality and quantity, but few studies have been conducted to compare the risk of feeding raw meat based diets with that of feeding commercial foods2 and no reports have been published on evaluation of the long-term risks and benefits of feeding raw meat based diets. The lack of consensus and paucity of good data can make it difficult for veterinarians to provide informed. […]