The raw industry has been rapidly evolving in the past couple years. The original ratio diets have become outdated as raw nutrition experts are formulating raw recipes using ingredient analysis and nutrient requirements, instead of simply following suggested meat, bone and organ ratios. Prey Model Raw or BARF guidelines, based on category of ingredients and using the balance over time approach, are still a great way to feed our pets but it requires an in depth understanding of raw feeding and commitment from pet parents. Raw companies are making it much easier for every customer to feed raw – making nutritious, complete and balanced diets that simply need to be thawed and served. Decades of science and research have provided us with knowledge of the nutrient requirements for dogs and cats and pet food manufacturers have been using this information when formulating processed diets.
Using nutrient guidelines, there are many science-based standards that can be used to create healthy pet food. NRC and AAFCO are the two most “popular” here in North America. But which one is best? Each set of standards has strengths and weaknesses, and both are a guarantee of a complete and balanced diet. The differences you may see in recipe formulations are often a result of how the science is interpreted by the professional who formulated them. The best way to choose what you prefer to feed your pet is to understand what the guidelines are, and how they differ from each other.
NRC is the acronym of a very old (1916) scientific and governmental organization, The National Research Council, that supports research and development, technology innovation, certifications, and industry standards, of three main fields of expertise: medicine, engineering, and science. In Canada the organization is still called National Research Council, but in the United States, it changed to National Academies, which publishes over 200 reference documents per year under the National Academy Press, including nutrient guidelines for many animal species, like the Nutrient Requirements of Dogs and Cats. In animal nutrition, we still refer to it as the NRC but that is not the actual name of the guideline.
The Nutrient Requirement books are well known references in animal nutrition. They contain literature reviews, unsponsored by the industry, of all the available science regarding animal nutrition, and are updated every couple of years. The NRC for dogs and cats is a 400+ page document, with tons of valuable information on nutrient requirements, safe upper amounts, and digestibility. It also includes pages on how to correctly interpret and use the provided numbers, for each specific life stage, even with some breed specific information.
The NRC is a reference for all animal nutrition professionals, but also for industry organizations like AAFCO, the Association of American Feeds Control. AAFCO is governed by a board of directors made up of professionals from the industry whose job it is to provide guidelines for the elaboration of pet food. AAFCO will provide guidelines on nutrient requirements, ingredients allowed to be used in pet food, marketing, as well as how and what information should be shared on packaging. Even though it looks like a regulatory organization, AAFCO does not technically do any regulating. That is left to the governmental organizations to enforce the rules for the pet food industry, and some will require that a pet food brand follows AAFCO guidelines to be on the market. Under FDA regulation, many states require pet food companies to follow AAFCO guidelines. This is not the case in Canada. Pet food does not have to meet AAFCO standards to be sold.
Though commonly used, AAFCO is scrutinized by many because they will allow the use of ingredients that are debated, like animal by-products and preservation agents that are not allowed in human grade food because of their potential hazard. There are also some marketing strategies that AAFCO allows that could be confusing for the uninformed, well-intentioned pet parent, like ingredient fractioning and misleading packaging claims. For example, a pet food labelled “with chicken” does not actually have to contain any amount or part of real chicken – only chicken flavour.
AAFCO’s nutrient guidelines are updated yearly based on new information found in NRC publications but are adapted, accounting for commonly used pet food ingredients. Some nutrient minimums will be much higher in the AAFCO guidelines than they are in NRC, because of a known lower digestibility associated with the ingredients commonly used in pet food as well as the transformation most pet foods go through during processing. This is actually a good thing: it protects pets from nutrient deficiency, by making sure that ingredients with lower digestibility are included in higher amounts to make sure they will cover the minimum requirement.
The iron requirement as per AAFCO is based on a digestibility of 20%, while an NRC literature review concludes that some organic forms of iron, such as those found in animal tissues, are digestible at 70%. This means the iron level in AAFCO formulated diets would be 3.5x higher than what would be needed with raw. Another example is magnesium for growing kittens. The AAFCO digestibility factor is 25% based on the forms of magnesium commonly used in commercially prepared pet food (oxide and sulfate) compared to the digestibility provided by the NRC for organic forms of magnesium, found in raw diets, which would be closer to 80% digestible. This means, AAFCO diets for kittens contain 3x more magnesium than what would be required in a raw diet. With this particular nutrient, even if fed at this much higher rate, the diet is still under the safe upper amount provided by the NRC. That means, it should not create a problem if fed every day or over a long period of time. This is definitely something to keep in mind when choosing which raw food to offer your pets. Knowing that a diet high in magnesium could lead to issues like urinary crystals, that domestic cats are particularly prone to, may influence which brand of raw is best for your pet.
At Big Country Raw, we are aware of the ways nutrition can be affected by the quality of the ingredients, how they are processed, and how these factors affect digestibility, and not being required to follow AAFCO guidelines in Canada, we decided to rely on the source of the information itself, the guidelines the NRC has set forth based on solid research and science. We feel this literature review is much more suitable to be applied to raw diets and allows us to customize our recipes to ensure that excess micronutrients are not included when they are simply not needed.