Alrighty. So, we have this book called "The Hundred-Year Lie" and I felt that I should share a few of these facts with everyone. It made me sick and we have stopped buying dog food from pet stores and ordered a book on raw dog food. (I'll let you know what it is, where we got it and if it's any good, once I know for myself.)

Some things that I thought were most important (there are a lot) I made bold and underlined. (Hope it's not too annoying with all the bold and underlining.. )

So, here is the quote from the book...
It's long, but so important, so please, if you can, read it all the way through.

"Myths We Cherish
Pet Food is Harmless

After forty years treating health problems in pets, Richard Pitcairn has reached a conclusion that should sober every human with a pet in their lives. 'Since I Graduated from veterinary school in 1965, I've noticed a general deterioration in pet health. We now see very young animals with diseases that we used to see in only older animals. It is clear to me that an accumulation of poor health is being passed on from generation to generation; this accumulation increases with each step. Without the perspective of several decades, veterinarians just coming out of veterinary school think these degenerative conditions in younger animals are 'normal.' They do not realize what has happened over the passage of time. I believe that, along with poor quality nutrients, the chemical additives in pet food play a major part in that decline.'
Many of us who have pet companions, particularly dogs and cats, have either seen firsthand or heard stories from other pet owners about how the animals contract illnesses, allergies, behavioral abnormalities, or diseases when consuming some commercial pet foods, only to miraculously recover once those processed foods are taken out of their diet. Given how pet foods are produced, it wouldn't be a surprise.
Four of the five largest U.S. pet food companies are subsidiaries of major multinational corporations that also produce processed foods for humans. American pet owners spend an estimated $11 billion annually on animal foods made in part or whole from the scraps, rejects, and wastes--known as 4-D meat--collected and set aside by plants producing human food. This 4-D category stand for dead, diseased, dying, or disabled.
When these meats are rendered at rendering plants, they are often mixed with restaurant and supermarket refuse, euthanized animals from animal shelters [animals that were put to sleep], sawdust, cooking grease, and even roadkill, to create a concoction that is then laced with colorings, preservatives, fat stabilizers, and other chemical additives. The finished product is sold as dry food or, more often, as semi-moist canned food (strangely enough, it also shows up as raw material for the cosmetic industry.)
'Semi-moist foods should be placed in a time capsule to serve as a record of modern technology gone mad,' warns Alfred J. Plechner, in his book Pet Allergies: Remedies for an Epidemic. The preservatives in these foods, such as ethoxyquin, give them 'a shelf life that spans eternity,' and they bio-accumulate inside animals. Ethoxyquin has been detected in dogs' livers and tissue months after being removed from their diet and has been linked to cancer.
After rendering, the raw materials often receive other fat-stabilizer chemicals, BHA and BHT being the most common, to prevent rancidity. Both of these chemicals have been outlawed by many European countries because they are known to cause liver, brain, reproductive, and kidney problems. There is also evidence that the rendering process fails to remove sodium pentobarbital, the drug used to euthanize many animals that become pet food, and fails to destroy the hormones and antibiotics used to fatten livestock that is later rendered. Other additives in moist food for pets have been identified by veterinarians as the source of additional heath concerns. These additives include propylene glycol, used for texure and moisture; potassium sorbate, added as a preservative; propyl gallate, intended to retard spoilage; and sodium nitrate, used as a preservative and coloring agent. Several dyes added to pet food, such as Red No. 40 and Blue No. 2, make the food more visually appealing only to the humans, since dogs and cats, not able to see colors the same way humans do, don't seem to care about coloration of their food. Both of these colorings are also used in soft drinks and candies for humans, and each has been red-flagged by the Center for Science in the Public Interest as a possible danger to heath. As happens with human food, pet food processors use the term "artificial flavorings" as a convenient doorway through which to add unlabeled synthetic chemicals that have been labeled safe, though they have undergone little or no testing. Even when safety studies are done on additives and preservatives, only the direct toxicity is tested and not potential synergistic effects.
Anecdotal evidence continues to mount that synthetic chemical additives in food affect both humans and their pets in similar ways. A California woman was quoted in a 2004 issue of Alternative Medicine magazine making this comparison: "I have two children with disabilities. One has ADHD and the other suffers from depression. I took them to many doctors and not a single one ever asked me anything about what they eat. But when I took my dog to the vet to ask about his hyperactivity, the first question the vet asked was, 'What diet do you have him on?' It turns out something in his food was exacerbating his condition, and as soon as I switched him to a different formula, he greatly improved. Eventually I did a lot of nutritional interventions with both my kids, and they did much better as well."

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So, there you go. Isn't that just sick!? Our animals are eating cats and dogs that were euthanized! And that same drug that put the animal to sleep is carried into our pet's food!!
I hope this has made a change in your life, in your dog's life. Because I know that my two puppies and any future pets, will never eat that stuff again. For more information about what they are doing to our food, you can pick up this book. It has a lot of great information.

Here is the part on diet drinks...

"Myths we Cherish
Artificial Sweeteners are Safe


For many people the discovery of dangers associated with artificial sweeteners, those chemicals that trick our bodies into believing we have consumed sugar, will only arise as a consequence of personal suffering. Paula Billie-Hamilton noticed how over time the diet sodas she was consuming altered her moods and gave her headaches. 'I only stopped drinking diet drinks after hearing reports that not only had the artificial sweeteners in these drinks been shown to cause headaches and an agitated state like intoxication, exactly the symptoms I had previously experienced, but they had also been shown to cause brain, liver, lung, kidney, and lymphoreticular cancer.'
Aspartame is the most common sweetening additive in more than one hundred diet and sugar-free products, ending up in soft drinks, cereals, frozen desserts, and tabletop sweeteners. It can also be found in such seemingly unlikely places as multivitamins, supplements, and pharmaceutical drugs. It contains three major components--Methanol, phenylalanine and aspartic acid. All three chemicals individually have been shown to either stimulate brain cells to death, upset hormone balances in the brain, or act as a nerve poison. The synergistic effects of these three chemical components on heath are largely unknown.
The Canadian authors of Hard to swallow: The Truth About Food Additives describe what happens when a diet drink containing aspartame is stored at a temperature of 85 degrees for a week or more: _{{Only 85°! It gets hotter than that in a car in the summer! ... sorry, back to the book...}} "There is no aspartame left in the soft drink, just the components it breaks down into, like formaldehyde, formic acid, and dieketopoperazine, a chemical which can cause brain tumors All of these substances are known to be toxic to humans."
It took sixteen years for the FDA to finally approve the use of aspartame, because many of the animal studies testing its safety had produced a disturbing pattern of brain tumors. In 1980 an FDA Board of Inquiry voted unanimously against approving aspartame for human consumption. A yeah later the commissioner of the FDA, Arther Hull Haynes Jr., over-ruled the his agency's own scientists and approved aspartame for use in dry food products. He approved its use in carbonated beverages in 1983. Soon thereafter Haynes left the FDA and went to work for G.D. Searle & Company, the pharmaceutical company that manufactured aspartame. (Searle subsequently was bought by Monsanto, which was later sold to Pfizer.)
Over the next two years, after aspartame was added to soft drinks, Professor J. W. Olney of the Washington University in Saint Louis School of Medicine found that the incidence of brain cancer among U.S. citizens increased by 10 percent on average, representing about 1,500 new cases a year. For persons over age sixty-five, the increases in brain cancer rates were an astounding 60 percent or more Olney was intrigued by the coincidence that studies of aspartame on lab animals had also found sharp increases in brain cancer, so he began conducting researching and published a series of papers in The England Journal of Medicine and elsewhere outlining how aspartame may cause brain damage in children.
Warnings about the toxicity of aspartame were issued in 1991 by the National Institute of Heath, which cataloged 167 adverse effects; in 1992 by the U.S. Air Force in a warning to its pilots not to fly after ingesting aspartame; and in 1994 by the United States Department of Heath and Human Services, which detailed eighty-eight documented symptoms of aspartame toxicity.Here is a partial list of diseases thought to be exacerbated or triggered by this additive: Birth defects, depression, mental retardation, chronic fatigue syndrome, brain tumors, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Yet, this chemical toxin, once listed by the Pentagon as a prospective biochemical warfare weapon, remains widespread as an additive through-out the U.S. food supply and that of seventy other nations. It has been banned in Japan and a few other countries. What is the secret to its survival?

There is more to this section, but it's pretty long. If you would like to read the rest, you can probably find it at your local bookstore, we got it at Borders.

Thank you for reading!
Please pass this on to your friends and family! C: