WHY COOKING YOUR PETS FOODS IS DETRIMENTAL
The fundamental principle behind Paw Printz is the raw food diet. It starts with one of the most simple and commonsense statements I have heard ‘dogs and cats can’t cook!’ Dogs and cats have not evolved eating cooked food. They are neither adequately designed or equipped to fully digest and absorb cooked food products.
Cats and dogs have been evolving on this planet for 40 million years (more than 2000 times the entire history of human evolution) eating raw food. Their mouths, teeth, stomach, intestines, organs and enzymes are all evolved to masticate process, digest and absorb the breakdown products of raw food. There is a growing stockpile of scientific evidence that links the long term consumption of cooked foods, especially cooked meat, to the development of a vast array of common illnesses and degenerative diseases including cancer. Skin disease and dermatitis, allergies, teeth and gum disease, arthritis, renal failure, ear infections, obesity, reproductive failure, anal gland blockage can all be linked to improper nutrition, and can all lead to poor quality of life for both pet and owner.
There are many negative aspects of cooking, but put simply, it does three basic things to foods:
Cooking destroys vitamins and enzymes. Vitamins, needed for normal growth and metabolism, are proteins, and as such are susceptible to the same denaturing as other protein. The hotter the cooking temperature, the worse the damage and loss of function of the vitamin or protein. Enzymes within the food, that are capable of digesting and releasing for absorption almost the entire content of the meal, are destroyed by cooking. These enzymes must then be replaced by the animals own body stores, at the animals own energy expense.
Cooking denatures protein - this means changes its molecular structure, changes its shape, mutates it. Sometimes this change is so small that the digestive system doesn’t recognise the change and absorbs the denatured protein. These molecules can trigger adverse reactions in the immune system and result in autoimmune diseases like arthritis and renal failure. Sometimes these molecules are carcinogens.
Cooking decreases digestibility and bioavailability. By creating these changes in protein, a percentage of available nutrients are rendered useless and thus not recognised by the intestines to be absorbed as normal food molecules. This means that although an animal may be ingesting foods that are known to contain certain nutritional elements, the animals body may not be able to utilise them in the cooked form. The single largest nutritional study ever performed over 30 years ago, highlighted just how damaging the effects of cooking are, and how subtle and insidious the damage can be. Results even suggest that some damage continues over generations and may become genetically irreversible, even on the best raw diet.
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