Is change in pet food a good thing? - Page 3

Okay, just realized we're talking two different stores here. Duh. I shop at PET VALU, not PetSmart!    Their prices are comparable with Global Pet Foods, the only other pet store in town.

I never buy pet food at the grocery stores.

what kind of a quality of "meat" do you think they put in the dog food?? :)

Joan: I did not say meat does not have nutritional value.

Hans: I know that you did not say that !   Nowhere have I said that you did. You change what I have said. I have taped and passed what you have said. You have said that it is "Impossible to buy any meat that is of nutritional value and not disease ridden that has full nutritional ingredients."

BTW I have used Blue Buffalo as an example. No need to latch your self on Petsmart or Blue buffalo. Basically, any granulated dog food of any consequence costs more than raw chicken in Walmart or in Costco for example.

Side note on enzymes (I teach biology).   Enzymes are catalytic proteins.  All proteins, including enzymes, are made from amino acids.  As long as a dog’s diet consists of plenty of protein (which will be broken down during digestion into amino acids), the dog will be able to make enzymes.  

Hans: Basically, any granulated dog food of any consequence costs more than raw chicken in Walmart or in Costco for example.

The feed I use is not granulated, it's extruded.
Does not matter how little the chicken costs compared to the feed I use. The chicken is not a complete diet, in order to keep enough on hand to feed (when it's an hour drive to Walmart) I would have to buy it by the case and freeze all but a couple day's worth to prevent spoilage...how much do you think a big chest freezer costs to run?
I tried feeding raw chicken for a couple years...the extra vegetables, the electric bill, and handling nasty raw chicken without contaminating everything that's touched, plus washing thoroughly the dog bowls to prevent them from stinking with rotten cheken grease was time consuming and labor intensive...not to mention grinding leg quarters or whole frams that was a lot cheeper from the chicken slaughter house and hour away one way. The big comercial grinder costs almost 400$ and it took hours to grind and package the correct amount to feed all the dogs per feeding so that only two days at a time got thawed.

My dogs are healthier now and I have more time to spend with them instead of wasting the preparing feed for them...and the electric bill is half what it was now that I got rid of the big chest freezers.

Phuque feeding raw...the dogs are healthier and it only takes a few minutes t feed everyone, no electricity to store feed.

I actually have calculated how much it costs to run a 27 qft freezer and it costs me about $6 per mo. Also when I freeze the load I can then turn the freezer off for days and then I spend even less. Also, nobody says that you need to feed just chicken you can feed other natural raw ingredients like eggs, other organ meat like tripe, a heart, kidneys liver and also other meats.  rabbit, goat meat ( Costco)  and so on, even though that  I mostly do feed chicken and sometimes tripe and beef heart and so on and dogs are just doing great - better than on any granulated food. Also grinding is not necessary since dogs have teeth and for hundreds of thousands of years, they have been using them with a success and have done so without the benefit of commercial Hobart meat grinder. 
The main reason I am using raw is that of the live enzymes as I have explained before. The dog must waste use of their own enzymes which taxing. on the dog longevity. Granulated/commercially processed dog food is totally void of these for life mandatory enzymes even though such food may have all the nutrition it is still way inferior to a raw diet. The nutritional elements while in commercial dog food may be plentiful must be processed by enzymes to be useful to the dog. 
As far as preparing food it is much less time consuming to feed raw because there is almost 0 waste. The stool is easy to be managed since it  is minuscule and not runny or soft because the food is easily digestible due to compatibility with dog's nutritional needs and due to enzymes present in raw food and that is why the stool from raw is about 10x smaller than from commercial dog food which is full of bulking fillers like ash, silica ( sand) and undigestable pulp and so on,... for which I am not willing to pay. The stool from raw meat resembles very much stool of wild canines which I see in the desert which to me tells me that my feeding practices are correct. ..

@gggunter. Thank you for your note. I really appreciate it. I am trying to understand this well and I may not have expressed correctly what I was trying to say. I am reading on this a lot and have read that as we - or for that matter, our dogs age - the ability to produce enzymes diminishes. As we age our enzyme levels drop dramatically, reducing both our level of health and vitality and finally of the age we will achieve. Basically, one of the reasons, if not THE reason, we age because our body lacks enzymes. For example, tests have shown that a 70-year-old has less than 10 percent of the cellular enzymes to that of a healthy infant—decreasing not only their immunity but also increasing their risk of developing life-threatening diseases or as we call it -we are getting old and ten die.
Yes, I know that as you say the enzymes are catalysts which enable and speed up reactions while they come out of the reaction unchanged.
To me from my reading, it seems obvious that our body can recycle and produce (from proteins and RNA) only so many enzymes so many times. As the body ages, this ability diminishes. How fast this ability diminishes depends on the number of enzymes the body creates from proteins and the number of times the body recycles these catalysts/enzymes.
I was also made to believe that this process can be extended through time and thus extend the age of organism if we supplement the enzymes used in digestion by enzymes which are present in raw foods. On the other hand, if we do not provide outside source of enzymes be eating raw food because we cook and thus destroy enzymes in processed food the body has to work harder and recycle these enzymes faster and more often and thus shortening the life of the dog/man or whatever "animal". What say you? I value your opinion since this really interests me.

All cellular process diminish as we age.  That’s normal.  In general, as long as a dog has a diet with sufficient protein, that protein will be broken down during digestion into the amino acids which are needed for

making new proteins, including enzymes.  As long as a dog is healthy and has enough protein in their diet, that dog should not have an enzyme deficiency.   As far as I know from my studies, enzyme deficiencies are caused by genetic abnormalities (such as Tay Sachs) or by damage to the pancreas.  

OK, I got that. But the question is if the diminishment of ability of the body to produce enzymes is accelerated by lack of ingestion ( eating) of self-digesting enzymes - enzymes present in the raw diet in comparison to a cooked processed diet where the destruction of the enzymes by cooking and other processing of the food happens at temps of 118*F included and during other such denaturalizing processing of the food.
I am gathering from the scientific and commercial literature that more cycles of recycling and production of enzymes the organism goes through the faster such organism wears out and faster such recycling and production of enzymes by the body diminishes.
I would crudely compare it to a motor in a car which runs hard and often in contrast to a motor who runs lightly and sparingly. The first one will wear faster than the second one.