The Sad Facts about Sugar

The 5 Highest Sugar Rich ingredients your Dogs & Cats should avoid.

At Just About Pets we’re routinely asked about Dog & Cat food ingredients. One of the most common questions we get is which brand of food has the least amount of sugar. Well I’m a firm believer in teaching someone to fish rather than simply fishing for them so today’s blog is about the top 5 highest glycemic index ingredients you’ll find in pet foods.

But, before we roll into those particular ingredients it’s important to understand what glycemic index actually means. Glycemic index is an indication as to the glycemic load of a food. Essentially the higher the glycemic index the faster that food raises the bodies blood sugar level.

Why does this matter? Your pets body has multiple hormones that can raise the blood sugar level, thus allowing the body to create glucose (which is what the dog or cats body uses for fuel) but they only have one hormone, insulin, that lowers the blood sugar level. Your pets pancreas produces insulin and with high glycemic index ingredients a staple in most commercial pet foods, it means your poor dog or cat’s pancreas is being heavily overtaxed with insulin production. As the pancreas is overtaxed it can lead to a host of problems with your pet which can include pancreatitis and diabetes.

Now that it’s a little clearer as to why it’s important to identify high glycemic index (or sugar filled) ingredients, let’s get to the top 5 culprits. The following FIVE ingredients are major contributors to our pets sugar problem and you should try and avoid, for their sake. They are in no particular order.

• White Rice:  White rice is simply brown rice that’s been milled and cleaned of it’s outer bran & germ. The trouble is these layers are where lie most of the grains nutrients and once you remove them all that’s really left is starch (or sugar). When viewed on the back of a bag of Cat or Dog food it can be written as simply rice. If your dog or cat food doesn’t specifically state a type of rice, it’s safe to assume that the rice ingredient is actually white rice. This particular ingredient is dangerous long term because of it’s incredibly high glycemic load.
• Brown Rice:  Unlike it’s white rice counterpart, brown rice is an incredible source of nutrients and vitamins including iron, manganese, selenium, magnesium, vitamin B and it even has Omega 3 oils. It also provides an excellent volume of dietary fibre. It has excellent nutrient value for peoples dogs, but it does spike the pets glycemic index and because it’s often in a very dry food that makes it’s glycemic value far higher than it would be even if it were on your own plate.
• Potato:  Due to customers demands to remove “grains” from Dog and Cat foods potato has recently become a star starch in many commercial pet food diets. Potatoes are a heavy dose of starch and although they do contain fibre, vitamin B6, vitamin C and some potassium they are mostly broken down into sugar. Because of their high starch nature you’ll often see bulkier stool with heavy potato diets as both dogs and cats have trouble digesting such gross amounts of starchy ingredients due to their carnivore preference dietary needs.
• Tapioca: Another “fad” dietary ingredient in pet foods has become Tapioca. Tapioca is derived by breaking down the Cassava plants roots into a pure starch. The high carbohydrate level of Tapioca is a perk to the ingredient panel of many foods, but it’s not a high source of any vitamins or nutrients and many consider it to be a very low form of filler in both dog and cat foods. Because Tapioca consists of little else but starch (sugar) they quantify as a high glycemic load ingredient.
• Oats: Similar to brown rice, Oats contain a lot of valuable nutrients, vitamins and fibre. Oats are a source of manganese, selenium, vitamin B1, phosphorus and magnesium. Due to their hard outer shell though Oats are not easily digested by dogs and are completely indigestible by cats. But, once the oats are moistened and cooked (as they would be in pet food) they become far more bio-available, yet I’d still not recommend them for any type of cat food.

These are five ingredients we should all be worried about finding too much of in our pets food. As you can see from the list, grains are often a culprit but so are there replacements you find in many pet foods; potato and tapioca.

As a quick note, sugar intake not only harms your pets insulin production and therefore their pancreas, sugar also is the preferred food source of unhealthy gut bacteria and cancer cells. Who wouldn’t want to improve their beautiful family pets overall health and help them live a longer life by avoiding both of those problems too.
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We will dig into gut health even deeper in future articles. But, for now thanks for reading and remember Just About Pets Wellness Centre is here “Because You Love Them”.