80/10/10, you hear this or read this in most Raw feeding communities, heck even some Raw food companies use these guidelines! And the reality of the situation is 80/10/10 is an inaccurate guide to providing an appropriate diet for your pets.
So what’s wrong with 80/10/10? We believe that putting only 10% bone in (if you can even honestly figure those numbers out) is not providing enough calcium. This leads to a lot of developmental issues and can be detrimental to the health of your pet. But how do we show people that the bio-availability in bone is not as much as they think? Well, today we’re here to reveal something to you!
Galileo always said… or I guess he once said, I didn’t really know the guy but he said, “All truths are easy to understand once discovered, the point is to discover them”, now today here you are going to witness a discovery! The discovery of the bioavailability of Calcium within these three substances that we are going to use to reveal the Truth of the needed bone content or calcium supplement in your dog’s diet!
First, let’s explain to you what we have here. We’re going to be using hydrochloric acid at a PH of 1 so extremely acidic! Quite close to what is in your dogs stomach! We will be using some calcium carbonate, some ground eggshell powder and finally some turkey bone.
We calculated that the quantity of each and every one of these items to have the same amount of calcium contained in them which is approximately 1.5 grams.
What we’re doing here is emulating your Dog’s stomach, what this will reveal is the calcium that is biologically available to your dog. We’re looking for the size of the reaction, this will show us how much calcium is available in each of these test subjects
You can watch the experiment here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCSEBjkdL1Q&t=192s
The results we found were
Control – Calcium Carbonate – We found this substance reacted immediately and strongly to the Hydrochloric acid, what this reaction told us is that all 1.5g of calcium within this substance and could potentially be absorbed immediately.
Supplement – Egg Shell Powder – We found this substance also reacted immediately but less strongly compared to the Control substance. this revealed to us that most of the 1.5g of calcium within the egg shell powder would be absorbed but not as immediately as the calcium carbonate.
Natural – Turkey Bone – We found this substance had a very slow and unreactive response to the hydrochloric acid. our findings were that the 1.5g of calcium would not be fully absorbed before exiting your pet’s digestive tract. This may mean that your pet will have to consume more bone or supplement enough calcium to offset the amount of phosphorous to provide proper development and or proper nutrition.
George explained why the turkey bone had a bit of a slower reaction compared to the calcium carbonate and the eggshells? He said that the turkey bone is approximately 10% calcium as opposed to the eggshells and the calcium carbonate tablet which are well over 40% available calcium.
Also, some of that calcium is actually embedded in other compounds within the bone which does not allow them to be very available.
The Turkey bone will still end up having a reaction eventually, but it will be much slower than the other two substances. The Bone has to go through a little bit of a digestion to reach a lot of the calcium.
So as you can see from this experiment and the various sources of calcium, you can see how the available Calcium differs and it takes a time to get to that Calcium within the bone. We here at MDF take this all into consideration when we go and create a formula for your Dog! We use a program called the Blending Program where we compare our recipes to Science-based nutritional guidelines. We have a video if you’d like to check that out further. here’s the link – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCSEBjkdL1Q&t=192s
From all of us here at Mountain Dog Food! 