You know those television commercials that have a dentist in a lab coat recommending a particular toothpaste? Well, the marketing ploy has drifted over to products meant for our pets, in a manner of speaking. A number of cat food manufacturers have a burst in large letters on the front of their packages that says the product is “Veterinarian Recommended.”
Is this even allowed? And if it is, what does it mean, exactly? How many veterinarians have to make the recommendation before it can appear on the label? And what are the criteria that need to be met for a vet to make the decision to endorse the product?
The guidelines behind the wording
The requirements behind the “Veterinarian Recommended” wording are a little bit more loosey goosey than you might think. The guidelines published by the Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO) say that “A personal or commercial endorsement is permitted on a pet food or specialty pet food label provided the endorsement is not false or misleading.” So yes, there are circumstances in which the claim can be valid.
The problem is that the guidelines do not provide clear specifications for endorsement. How to determine whether the claim is misleading is a bit up in the air. AAFCO does have a Pet Food Committee that says conducting a statistically valid survey of veterinarians is essential to supporting such a claim. In other words, querying just one or two veterinarians would appear to be insufficient. But the minimum number of vets to weigh in is not stated, and neither is the format of the survey they would need to respond to. There are no hard-and-fast rules for what questions they would be asked.
AAFCO’s Pet Food Committee acknowledges the inherent difficulties itself, noting that there is so much variation in “statistically sound.” In other words, the specific number of veterinarians needed to make a claim is a moving target; it’s not possible to designate exactly how many should weigh in.
Making things a little more complicated still is that AAFCO does not set rules. Its guidelines are just that — guidelines. It’s up to state legislatures to decide whether to use the guidelines’ wording to create laws around pet foods. In general they do, and that means various states have not taken up the issue of “Veterinarian Recommended” for further review. It’s not surprising. After all, how often would the wording on pet food labels make it to a state’s legislative body for consideration?
Where do you go from here?
Deborah Linder, DVM, a board-certified veterinary nutritionist at Tufts University and a member of our editorial board, recommends that because the term “Veterinarian Recommended” does not have a standard that can be easily applied, it’s not what you should be using to make a determination about which pet food to buy. Instead, she suggests looking at other criteria.
One of the most important is whether the food has been through AAFCO feeding trials and, if not, does it at least have the nutrient levels recommended by AAFCO? (You can find this information in the Statement of Nutritional Adequacy. It’s generally a single sentence in small type on the side of the bag or can, at the bottom.)
You also want to make sure, Dr. Linder says, that the company focuses more on telling you what is good about its food instead of what is bad about others. That’s not a good sign.
Additionally, a reputable pet food company should be able to answer questions about how much of various nutrients are in the product in a way that you can understand, for instance, how many milligrams of a nutrient per 100 calories. Information like that should be at their fingertips.
It’s fair, too, to find out from a company whether it has at least one full-time person on staff (as opposed to an outside reviewer or consultant) who has a PhD in animal nutrition or who is a veterinarian board-certified in nutrition. It should.
Finally, you can ask whether the company owns the plant where the food is made. If not (the case for most small companies), it has less oversight over quality control.
