Vitamins are essential for our furry friends!
Dogs require vitamins as part of their daily diet just as much as we do. Vitamins help keep your dog's skin and coat healthy, strengthen bones and teeth, and give them the overall energy they need to function.
A vitamin deficiency therefore can lead to serious health consequences. Since your dogs' bodies cannot produce the essential vitamins themselves, they must be ingested through food. Ideally, these are the original nutrients of the fresh ingredients and not artificially added nutrients. This is exactly the approach we at BUNCH pursue and we strongly distance ourselves from adding any additives, including added vitamins and minerals. We only use fresh ingredients such as meat, offal, vegetables, fruits and high-quality oils and herbs. Due to the gentle air-drying process, the natural vitamins and minerals contained in our ingredients are almost completely preserved.
Why do common pet food brands add artificial additives?
In the usual industrial production of dog food, known as extrusion, the ingredients, which are often only available as flour, or corn are heated up under high pressure. As a result, most of the natural vitamins and minerals are lost. To compensate for this, synthetic vitamins and minerals are sprayed onto the extruded nuggets. Flavour carriers such as fats or flavour enhancers also have to be artificially sprayed on afterwards.
Even if the ingredients of some brands are very good, the feed is baked at very high temperatures, and then it goes through a process called extrusion to get it into the little pieces, and that destroys so much nutritional value of the ingredients. And that unfortunately to meet the FDA, or what's called AAFCO regulations, the pet food industry has to put all of these vitamins and minerals back in, and they put them in synthetic forms. Synthetic vitamins are just not healthy for the body. -Dr Goldstein
The worst case:
In one case, a pet food manufacturer had to withdraw wet food from the market that had resulted in the death of several dogs.
Vitamin D was artificially added to the industrial food, which lead to the death of the dogs. A high Vitamin D concentration is so dangerous because it can lead to vascular and kidney calcifications.
How is it possible that (Industrial) feed contains too much vitamin D?
Because vitamins degrade over time, it is common in the industry to spray on higher doses of synthetic vitamins and minerals than stated on the packaging so that the stated nutrient content is still present at the end of the best-before date. If the doses are too high, it can quickly become dangerous for dogs.
Synthetic vitamins - even in the right dosage - are no comparable alternative to vitamins and minerals from fresh ingredients. Because artificial vitamins and minerals are often not bioavailable to the dog and therefore cannot be processed sufficiently. The reason for this is the different chemical compositions. In the worst case, the synthetic vitamins and minerals can even cause illness themselves.
Our approach
Our BUNCH products therefore only contain fresh ingredients such as fresh meat, fresh offal and calcium bones as well as fresh fruit and vegetables and high-quality oils and herbs. Our feed is neither extruded nor cold-pressed, but gently air and freeze-dried. All of our products are free from flavour enhancers, colourings and preservatives and manufactured in Germany under strict quality controls according to IFS Food.
