I was recently asked to comment on an advertising card for Evolution Diet. There are a number of claims made, and because they are vague and wildly inflammatory, it is difficult to address them in an evidence-based manner, but I’ll do my best.
1. “Up to 30% Longer Life Expectancy”. This is in large, colored type adjacent to the name of the diet and a picture of a puppy and kitten. No evidence is presented on the card or the various websites associated with the company or the CEO Eric Weisman. Much is made of a couple of studies linking calorie restriction to some increase in life expectancy in various experimental animal studies. This is an interesting area of research, but it has no connection to the implied benefits of feeding this diet.
2. According to this advertisement, the pet food industry “provides a convenient way for the disposal of slaughterhouse toxic wastes unfit for human consumption” “hard to digest, nutrient deficient toxic ingredients include: intestines, udders, stomachs, lungs, heads…drugs and pharmaceuticals (antibiotics, hormones)…euthanized pets.”
A wild string of fallacies, nonsense, and outright lies. It is true that some parts of animals that people think of as icky are used to make pet food. But if lungs, intestines, stomachs, eyeballs and so on are all toxic, then why aren’t they poisoning all those cats who hunt rodents and birds, or for that matter every other carnivore that eats them routinely in the wild? Of course, Mr. Weisman would say they are, but the logic behind claiming that an obligate carnivore like a cat or ferret is healthiest if fed a vegan diet is bizarre and indefensible.
Antibiotics and drugs used in agricultural animals (which are then used to make pet food) are regulated very tightly because we eat the meat from these animals, and there isn’t any more of these things in the pet food that isn’t also in the steak we eat, which is to say little to none under normal circumstances. There are some real and serious issues about what we feed to animals intended for consumption, but these have little to do with the claims Evolution Diets makes.
The pentobarbital thing I addressed in my previous discussion of nutritional myths, and you can find the details on the FDA web site. In short, miniscule amounts were found in some (not “all”) foods tested, but no traces of dog or cat DNA were found in these foods, and there are separate companies and facilities involved in rendering companion animals and agricultural animals used to make pet food, so it’s pretty darned unlikely there are regularly pets in pet food. No one is sure where the pentobarbital comes from, but it’s possible a euthanized horse occasionally makes it into a rendering plant that provides ingredients for pet food. This is obviously not desirable, but it has also not been shown to represent a real health risk.
Is the amount of pentobarbital in some pet foods toxic? Pretty unlikely. The FDA calculated the maximum exposure and determined it was far too low to represent a danger. And contrary to what purveyors of the naturalistic fallacy generally think, dose matters in toxicology. Enough oxygen or water can kill you, though these are essential for life, and we all get tiny amounts of “natural” and synthetic substances in eating, drinking, and breathing all the time and always have. Common herbs and spices used in cooking have been linked to cancer, as long as they are fed in obscene amounts to rats. Does that mean we’re all going to die of oregano poisoning? It’s a big leap from saying tiny amounts of possibly toxic things are present to showing that there are health consequences to this, and this hasn’t been shown here.
3. “…millions of Dogs and Cats suffer and die each year from cancers, kidney/liver failure, heart disease, etc” and “scientific studies demonstrate that there are nutrient deficiencies for immune system, cardio-vascular and urinary tract precursor proteins in all basic meat, poultry, and fish-based pet foods.” I’d love to take a look at these studies, as I’m sure would all the veterinary nutritionists who don’t seem to be aware of them. AAFCO sets standards which all major manufacturers follow for nutrient content in foods, and I’m not aware of any evidence that every dog food made except this company’s is nutrient deficient and causes disease. The advertisement states the food is “complete and balanced for all life stages,” which at least claims compliance with AAFCO guidelines, just like every other commercial pet food.
As for the implication that cancer, kidney failure, liver failure, and heart disease in pets are somehow due to toxic ingredients or nutritional deficiencies in foods, well they just made that up. It is the most egregious kind of unfounded fear mongering with no evidence provided to support it.
4. “Literally, all major commercial pet food brands and suppliers, including most brand names, have been involved in major pet food recalls that have sickened and killed millions of Dogs and Cats in the U.S.” “Never a Recall!”
I’m not sure it’s possible to check the accuracy of these claims. Certainly, many pet foods have been recalled at one time or another, but I think it would be hard to show that all foods except this one have been. And the implication that this implies the foods are killing dogs and cats is nonsense. Most recalls are precautionary and no actual harm is ever found. And in those cases where some contaminate is actually present, a recall is an example of a responsible action that saves lives. The melamine incident, which I suspect is being referred to, involved a non-animal ingredient (what was supposed to be wheat protein but got adulterated with the melamine). Wheat and corn gluten meal are the first two ingredients on several of the Evolution Diets, and while I don’t know where they get these, the issue of contamination is just as likely to come up for this company as any other.
Interestingly, in 2003 a recall of Go! Natural pet food was conducted due to a number of cases of acute liver failure associated with the food. The underlying cause was never found, but the company manufacturing the food continues to tout it as healthier based on claims about “good” and “bad” ingredients very similar to those made on the Evolution Diet site. Simply claiming something is healthy and natural provides no assurance that it is safe or healthy.
Finally, if you check out the web site for the company producing this diet, you might get a hint of the ideology behind this product from the CEO’s diatribe on the evils of mainstream medicine, and the reason why we could all stop getting sick and dying if we just followed the messianic vision of the CEO of this company, Eris Weisman. Here’s a sample:
“One of the most important reasons why many veterinarians do not like Evolution Diet Pet Foods is because people using them have much healthier pets. When pets become healthier, they become much less dependent on veterinary services and vets make much less money. Sadly, most medical doctors and veterinarians are more concerned about their income then your health or the health of your pet(s) respectively.”
What do you think? Sound like the vets you know? So, once again, it’s the small visionary against the evil establishment, who are all crooked and deluded. He talks at length about how his vision would save humans as well as pets from our toxic environment, and the increase in health and longevity brought about by science and medicine in the last 150 years appears to have escaped him. A messianic version of the David and Goliath complex.
Mr. Weisman is an interesting character. He claims a number of academic credentials, including “2 Diplomats[sic] and a Doctorate in post-graduate Health Sciences at Northwestern Health Sciences University in Minnesota…[and] a National Board Diplomat[sic] for his Post Graduate Work in Health Sciences.” The university he refers to is a college of chiropractic, acupuncture, and oriental medicine, and while I can find no reference to the graduate programs Mr. Weisman claim to have completed, it is possible they are offered there. Likewise, I can find no sign of a National Board of Health Sciences for him to be a diplomate of, but I suppose it might exist. He also claims to have been “a physician in private practice using Vitamin, Botanical, Nutraceutical & Nutrition Therapy for Humans” and makes references to time in medical school, but he doesn’t use M.D. and he recommends Naturopathy, so it is impossible to tell whether he was a true physician or a Naturopath.
In any case, despite offering these credentials, Mr. Weisman disdains formal academic training and the medical profession generally. He says:
“I was not a great student until my later years in post graduate school. Part of the problem I faced in the schools I attended was my constant need to question why things were being taught and if they were true in the first place.
It took me decades to realize that many of the courses taught in schools are based on misinformation and half truths much like television and newspapaer[sic] news. It wasn’t because the teaching staff suddenly decided to inform me, it was because I studied alternate books with different information that opposed what I was being taught in various schools, colleges and universities.”
He clearly likes to portray himself as a misunderstood visionary, as is so often the case for people selling quackery. He begins his essay on the “VETERINARY & HUMAN MEDICINE IN CRISIS and How I Have Extended and Improved Quality Of Life in Cats, Ferrets, Dogs and Humans with Supplements & Nutrition” with a dedication to a number of famous vegetarians, including Max Gerson, originator of the infamous Gerson cancer therapy which, along with its offspring the Gonzalez Protocol, is a shining example of abusing the desperation of cancer patients and torturing them with uncomfortable and irrational diet, coffee enemas, and other nonsense that only magnifies their suffering without treating their disease. He frequently reminds us that most doctors are either simple greedy liars or brainwashed by the media, since we all know “Television and Radio are very powerful influences that easily manipulate most human minds: Except for people like myself.”
Mr. Weisman is clearly driven by the quasi-religious belief that he has a unique insight into the conspiracy of government and industry that exists to keep people and animals ill for profit and to keep them under control. He refers to painful experiences in his own past, including his mother’s mental illness, which he attributes to electroconvulsive therapy experiments performed on her by the CIA and the Canadian Psyschiatric Association*, and the death of his father from heart disease which he attributes to eating meat, fish, and poultry and to the deliberate refusal of doctors to properly resuscitate him from the last of his many heart attacks.* *
Like all of us, he has suffered painful losses of loved ones and had to watch suffering and disease that could not be prevented or cured. But his reaction to this is to reject science, to blame his pain on the deliberate evil and lack of vision of the rest of the world, and then to invent his own reality in which he has simple answers that will make the pain go away. That may be understandable for him as a human being, but it is not justification for selling that private, and false vision to others through hysterical scare tactics and fear mongering, as well as defamation of the medical profession and outright lies. The diets he sells may or may not be perfectly adequate, acceptable pet foods, but they are not the key to preventing or curing death and disease that he claims. And the rest of the pet food industry, of which he is a part despite his protestations, may not be any better than any other collection of people or companies, but it is not the sinister conspiracy deliberately marketing death and disease that he portrays.
I would like to think the Evolution Diet marketing strategy sufficiently absurd on the face of it that it would fail, but clearly this isn’t the case. Smart, well-intentioned pet owners can be fooled and frightened by the unfounded claims and accusations Mr. Weisman makes. Hopefully, demonstrating the lack of evidence, and the bizarre agenda and worldview behind his statements will help people make their own, sound decisions about how to best care for their animal companions.
*”When a child, I dreamt that I could one day free my mother from her long term illness that was caused by an experimental “medical” study procedure (she was made a subject without her permission). I hoped that the knowledge I would accrue from different colleges and universities would help me achieve this goal.
I only found out that my mother was a forced participant in a series of electro-convulsive shock experiments at a Canadian Hospital after I saw an extensive film documentary on CIA studies that resulted in litigation. The litigation was a result of unsuspecting hospital patients being used as subjects for various forms of torture and abuse at three Canadian Hospitals. I went back into my mother’s medical file to find out that she was at the same hospital at the same time refered to in the documentary. In the files were references to a series of electro convulsive shock treatments she recieved at that Hospital over a two month period.
According to the documentary, the CIA and Canadian Psychiatric Association conducted interogation and brain washing experiments on unwitting patients at the same Canadian Hospital my mother went to for a mild case of post partum depression. After my father brought her to that hospital, she was treated with high doses of electro-convulsive shock for her simple problem of unhappy mood linked to increased responsibility with my sister’s birth. During her two months of treatment, she developed a permanent form of advancing dementia from which she never recovered and increased as she aged.
From the bright, intelligent, pretty and generous woman she was, I remember how sick and dull her personality seemed after she came back from her long stay at that hospital. I remember that she was never the same bright person she was before she went in, but I had no complete understanding of why until the summer of 1993 after watching that televison CIA law suit documentary and delving into my mother’s medical records. As I watched the documentery in awe, I did not know then that my mother was going to die from some of the related injuries she sustained in that study just three years later (1996).”
**”It was a cool, wet and dark October Morning in Toronto at about 1:00 AM in 2004. I pulled my father’s car into the Sunnybrook Hospital Parking lot ramp near the front Emergency Entrance and stopped next to a concrete parking wall. I turned off the engine and looked at my pretty twenty-three year old neice Angela and said, “I don’t think he made it.” I was preparing myself for the worst.
Angela was crying “They’re doing all they can to resusitate him, aren’t they?”
Tears had welled up in my eyes. “It looks like a Dog and Pony Show to me. The doctors told me that they did not think he was a good candidate for resusitation. The On Call Doctor told me he did not want to resusitate him. He said that Dad would not make it, but I promised Dad I would have it done. It was the last thing he asked me to do. The doctor told me that Dad has so many forms of organ failure…his heart especially: He has little chance of making it. Just the way they put him on that table in the resusitation room tells me it’s over. That had him lying in a fully recombant position even though he has pneumonia. With all that fluid in his lungs, how can he even breath or be resusitated in a fully recumbant position. I don’t think they were really giving him a chance to make it.”
Angela jutted her head forward and cocked it to the left, looking straight into my eyes, “You think that they would just let him die and make it look like they were going to help him?”
“I think they do this kind of thing every day in hospitals throughout the US and Canada…
I said, “I hope you are going to change your diet. This might be your last chance Dad. I really mean it Dad. I don’t think you are going to make it next time. You’ve got to change your diet for real this time. I can tell by the way you have been forgetting things that you are in trouble…and you haven’t been answering my pahone calls. You just got out of the hospital for heart failure. Don’t you know that everytime you eat meat, poultry, fish or dairy products that you progressively block all of your arteries. It’s very serious because the most important arteries that are being blocked are in your heart and brain. Dad you’ve got to stop eating that stuff…you’ve had five heart attacks and it’s animal fat and animal cholesterol that have caused each one. I don’t want you to die. That’s why we came to visit you. Lynn and I want you to change your diet now. You’ve got to stop blocking your arteries with animal fat and cholesterol…
Flash forward to that cool, wet, dark October Morning. My niece and I entered the special resusitation room and looked at my Dad’s still warm, but lifeless body. He still had a large ortho-pharyngeal tube poking out of his motionless mouth. He looked so still. It was so unlike him. He was a man that lived life to the fullest. If he would have only taken meat, poultry and fish out of his diet when I had spoken to him six months earlier. I knew that he would still be here. Animal fat and cholesterol are what progressively killed his organs by blocking his arteries.”
*
Oh, good grief! What a farrago.
Excellent, I’ve learned a new word!
I wish I had two Diplomats. I wonder where he keeps them?
I looked at the web page -
“Americans for the most part are not very intelligent when it comes to food”………….
what happened to “the customer is always right”? Nothing like insulting the clients to get one off to a good commercial start!
Ugh, not only did the website make me want to hurl, but reading just a hint of this guy’s history leaves me wondering how psychotic he must be. I can’t tell just from the website or your post, but if his mom had some form of mental illness, maybe someone should tell Weisman that’s a common hereditary trait. Or maybe he’s just paranoid dilusional by his own doing.
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I realize that the website is a bit painful on the brain and the last post was over a year ago, but I think some things need to be cleared up for other people who stumble across this. The reason that pet food derived from the leftover slaughter house bits and pieces is “toxic” is because of the way that the animals being slaughtered are treated. For starters allot of them are force fed foods that are not in their diet. For example corn fed beef. I hear commercials on the radio stating that a certain store is now carrying corn fed beef as if it is a good thing. Cows are normally supposed to eat grass. They are a grassing animal and have no use for corn. The reason that they are given it is because of the high starch and protein content which allows them to gain weight faster. As a result this is incredibly hard on their systems and causes lots of different diseases. One of the most prominent problems with this diet is it causes their stomaches to expand until they tear out their side and have to be sewn back together (no trip to the vet here, every farmer is a seamstress).
The reason that these leftover parts are being labeled “toxic” is because of all of the medication and antibiotics being fed to the cows to keep them alive on this corn diet. If you had to eat someone because of a plane crash and you where stranded, would you choose the alcoholic drug addict, or the fit lean muscular person (if you could catch them, and this is not an issue of who’s life is worth more)? Think of all of those antibiotics and medicines being filtered out by the liver, passing through the intestines/stomach, and forming deposits in the fat and soft tissues(eyes, mucus membranes).
As for our pets, we have one stray cat that has joined us. His name is Drake and he suffers from Struvite crystals (blocked urinary tract) which could kill him in under 30 hours if we don’t catch it in time. So, Mr. Drake had an incident while we where away and had to be rushed to the vet for some special treatment. Everything went well and he was fine to return home again (after our $1000 bill of course ). As we where leaving the vet suggested switching him to this scientifically formulated cat food that was designed to prevent this from happening again. “Sure we’ll take the biggest bag you have” we said.
Some time had passed and Drake was enjoying his new food a little..well lets say indulgently. He was so incredibly skinny when we found him that he only weighed 1.7 pounds, so he now has a food addiction. I started to feel a bit concerned as he was beginning to roll himself from room to room, so I looked at the ingredients…WOW. There was not a thing missing from that ingredient list, it was like the construction plans for a nuclear reactor! Do you know what chicken meal is? Well my frinds take one chicken, lightly stew whole and simply add to your food processor on high for 5 minutes…..we started looking for alternatives and tried Evolution pet food. Drake LOVES it. I do mean love, and he is so energetic and fit now. Have you ever picked up a cat and it feels sort of like a water balloon? Well we have 4 cats in total and it is like picking up panthers. They are strong, well proportioned and active (not sleeping more than half the time). They also seem really happy greeting us at the door when we come home, purring and wanting to cuddle all the time.
I have no connection to Evolution pet foods, and it costs us a small fortune to get it in Canada ($100 shipping, thanks USPS), but I would never go back. Sorry this is so long winded, but it is something that is important to me and I hate to see a good product that can bring so much good to pets be poorly represented like this. Sure the website is a bit of a laugh, but the owner is a very caring man who is extremely knowledgeable and has a profound love for animals. I have to phone to order, because i’m in Canada and their website is not designed to do it yet, and have spoke to him in person. He has given me great council in regards to Drake, and has even given me a discount to accommodate some of the shipping.
Thanks for reading this, even if you skimmed
I appreciate the detailed response. Unfortunately, there are a lot of misconceptions in there.
First, what is a “toxin?” This is a word freely and sloppily used. Of course, nothing is toxic in small enough quantities (which is why you can get away with making homeopathic remedies out of poisons), and everything is toxic, including water and oxygen, if you take in enough of it. The word is most reasonably used of substances that cause ill effects at quantities one might reasonably be expected to be exposed to under normal circumstances. So, is beef from cows fed grain a toxin? No, of course not. Grain is a natural food for ruminant, and they eat it readily (no one is force feeding it to beef cattle, apart from the veal issue). Too much, however, can cause health problems, such as rumen acidosis. What domestic cattle might eat in the wild is, of course, a pointless question since selective breding over thousands of years have altered their physiology so far from wild ancestors that the notion of what is “natural” for a domestic cow is meaningless.
Finding the balance between maximizing growth and avoiding such problems is a big part of the job of modern cattle ranchers and dairy farmers. Now, I happen to be a vegetarian, and I don’t care for the practices of industrial agriculture on a number of levels, but the argument that beef from grain-fed cattle is toxic because this is an “unnatural” food for them is simply not true. Research on the putative health benefits of organically produced foods doesn’t support the claim that these are healthier, though there can be environmental benefits to such production methods.
As for antibiotics, growth hormones, and other medications given to beef cattle, there are definately some potential problems there, though I think most people who comment as you have on the health of these practices don’t know much about the details, or the extreme lengths to which regulators and most ranchers go to avoid contaminating the human food chain. The question of which parts of the cow are used for pet food manufacture is one I have dealt with in several posts, particularly Pet Food Nutrition Myths. The idea that some parts of the cow are toxic and others aren’t is irrational. Some may have more nutritional value than others for dogs, but even these arguments are usually a mischaracterization since the nutritional value of commercial foods as a whole are well-understood and documented, and the sources of particular nutrients doesn’t have the mystical “good” and “bad” value people such as the marketers of Evolution Diet like to claim.
As for your comments about your cat, there is too much nonsense in there to even deal with. Your cat gained weight because he was fed too much, not because there was chicken meal in the food. Chicken meal is just a description of the very parts of a bird that a cat east when they can catch one, so where you get this hysterical stuff about a “nuclear reactor” I have no idea. Food addiction?! Give me a break! We all have a food addiction. Ever try to go without food for an extende time. I see many, many lean healthy cats fed commercial diets of appropriate nutritional value and in appropriate quantity. The blame for the obeisity epidemic goes strictly on we pet owners and how much we feed our pets, not on the ingredients in the diets we use. And do you really mean to suggest you think people’s cats wouldn’t be interested in cuddling or happy to see their owners if they aren’t feeding this diet?!
As for interstitial cystitis and urinary tract obstruction, this is a poorly understood syndrome with lost of risk factors but no discretely identifiable cause, so unfortunately people are free to make up all sorts of things about it. Most of the commercial diets for treatment of this problem have pretty limited data supporting the contention that they prevent recurrence, but there is even less information to suggest alternative diets are beneficial, so you are essentially suggesting going from something that probably helps a little to something that might help, might do nothing, or might even make the problem worse.
Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. And the facts are not on the side of most of your opinions here. Still, I appreciate the detailed and civil disagreement, and I think it’s important for people to be able to see the strengths and weaknesses of argumetns on both sides.
Cats are at least more resilient than ferrets. What gets me is their ferret food is basically made from grain – which is like feeding death in a bag to a ferret. They cannot digest it or gain any nutrients from grains or vegetables because their digestive tracts are so short and vegetables and grains are too hard to break down in the 3-4 hours that food passes through them. Cats are also obligate carnivores and I’d never feed them this crap either, but at they can at least some nutrients over the course of digestion. Any kibble I buy must be grain free, with high fat and protein content, and for ferrets it must be animal protein and fat, as they can’t absorb it from any other sources. I can’t believe it’s actually legal for them to sell this, and I hope no ferrets are forced to eat this.
I have switched my cats’ (all four of them) to Evolution Diet about 5 months ago. Cats are more fit and agile now. One cat’s poop used to smell pretty bad, now it doesn’t have that quality. I also let them digest food thoroughly so I don’t feed them every 2 hours and they don’t have a full bowl all the time. I give feed them 2 times a day and it results in proper digestion. I wish more stores would carry these products so I wouldn’t have to pay shipping.
I’m glad your cats are doing well, but for reasons that are at the heart of what this blog is about, that isn’t a reliable guide to whether or not this product is truly beneficial or the marketing points behind it are true. There is not a single medical or nutritional intervention, no matter how preposterous or how demonstrably ineffective or harmful, that has not had positive testimonials to support it. So either everything works, or testimonials aren’t reliable.
Hey- I got an idea. Put this Mr Wise-man on a tea party republican ticket with our beloved Michelle Bachman. She is another one who never lets the truth get in the way of a good lie. They could make beautiful music together or at least a —load of money which is really the main goal behind all their blabber. But, as they say, there is a sucker born every millesecond, and I’m afraid this blog is reaching very few of them. Sorry I can’t be more “Minnesota Nice”.
I am currently considering Evolution Diet for my cat. Meat produced in factory farms is not fit for man or beast. I have been down the pet food road for a while and I felt this post was biased. There have been quite a few recalls on cat food; I know Authority nearly killed my cat. Lack of quality in people food is pandemic of course it’s only going to be far worse for pets. Is it any wonder vets make a fortune on sick animals.
I’m a vegetarian myself, so I don’t care much for industrial meat production. That said, this food is marketed by fraud and misinformation from an individual who has made his career out of defaming others and violating the law (as you can see here and here). Why on earth one could imagine it is somehow a healthier alternative to other commercial foods is hard to imagine.
As for the implication that veterinarians might not be genuinely committed to pet health because they “make a fortune on sick animals,” this is offensive nonsense, pure and simple.
As a vegetarian myself, I’ve been torn about feeding my pets (German shepherd and shorthaired cat) meat. I know cats are carnivores, and I currently use Merrick’s food for them because of the ingredient list. I’d been thinking of switching to the Evolution diet on the advice of a friend, but had not seen their website, and am glad I found this article! But I wonder–are there any vegetarian pet foods out there that can give pets, especially cats, the nutrition they need? (I ask this for ethical reasons, not because I think eating meat in organic products is “dangerous” for my animals.)
I appreciate your dilemma as I don’t eat meat myself. Unfortunately, no one has ever successfully demonstrated than a diet with no animal protein can be safely fed to a cat long-term. A number that have appeared to be nutritionally balanced on paper led to heart disease when actually fed to cats. They are obligate carnivores and a number of essential nutrients simply don’t occur in a useable form in plants. It might be theoretically possible using synthetic taurine and other such nutrients, but periodically I check with the nutrition specialists about this, and so far no one has succeeded. Some of the diets out there claim to be acceptable for cats, but then cases of cardiomyopathy and other deficiency diseases start showing up.
For dogs, it is probably possible to feed a vegan diet, though sometimes these diets are still supplemented with amino acids or D vitamins from animal sources, so depending on how strict you wish to be you may have to check with the company. I would suggest contacting a veterinary nutritionist, such as the Clinical Nutrition Service at the UC Davis vet school or pediets.com for advice (or depending on where you are the nearest veterinary school will likely have a board-certified nutritionist).
Also, you might want to check out this site: http://skepticalvegan.wordpress.com/
Good luck!
Thanks so much for your thoughtful input!