Nature's Worst
One of my least favorite foods on the planet!!! One of the few that has wheat and soy (errrrh). When it first came out, I talked to all of my local SD reps, including a couple of vets from the SD headquarters and asked them what the heck they thought they were doing with this food. "Its insane", I told them. They acted like it was out of their control..and it was. Even the cute little shapes and colors were not the Science Diet of old.
The history of Hill's Science Diet becoming one of the leaders in the pet food industry years ago is one of my favorites. It illustrates my platform (no gluten, casein, soy, corn) so perfectly.
When I graduated 26 years ago, dog food was made of corn. And corn was bad enough, with allergies and food allergies being a significant but muuuuuch smaller problem than it would become later. Part of the problem back then were milk-coated puppy/kitten chows, which sensitized them to dairy products at an early age. Milk was the number one food allergen in pets at that time. (Wheat was number two).
About 10 years after I graduated, the pet food industry did the single most devastating thing every done to pet health (in retrospect)- they transitioned from corn-based to wheat-based pet foods. THAT is when allergies went from being A topic in medicine to THE topic in medicine. Suddenly...and I remember it like it was yesterday...we were all taking about how sick dogs had become. No one knew why but dogs were falling apart. Even mutts were having allergies, immune-mediated diseases, and early cancer. When I look back at it, I wanna cry.
And they did this in the face of current veterinary knowledge. Why? There was a wheat glut in this country due to a shift in the global economy (China became the number one grower of wheat in the world, for one) and wheat became CHEAPER than corn. It was that simple. So, despite the fact that the veterinary literature said that, behind cow milk, wheat was the number two food allergen, they started making almost all dog food out of wheat....EXCEPT Hill's.
Yes, Hill's entire claim to fame was that, when everyone else took a big left turn and started making pet food out of wheat, Hill's stayed on the corn road. That was it...plain and simple. Their food was better because it was made out of the number 4 allergen, not the number two allergen (with wheat becoming the number one after the milk was eliminated). For this, they should be proud. If they had stayed the course, I would be their best unpaid spokesman.
But what about now??? Yes, Hill's has finally fallen off the cliff and is making many of their foods with wheat and soy. Corn was and still is bad enough. And what we have done to corn over the past 25 years will curl your hair (look up Starlink/CRY9C corn). I have dropped almost all of the Hill's line of foods because of these changes.
And "Nature's Best"???....everything but.
