Canning reduces the solubility of phosphorus in pet food

What is it about?

Excess intake of the mineral phosphate through phosphate-containg food and feed additives, aka inorganic phosphates, causes various adverse health effects. Unfortunately, declaration of use and amount of these additives in pet food is not mendatory in the EU and standard laboratory methods cannot distiguish between these additives and organic phosphate from feed ingredients sourced from animals and plants. Therefore, avoidance of phosphate containing additives is practically impossible. The phosphate fractionation method has been validated for animal feed (Lineva et al. 2019) and measures the proportion of readily soluble and therefore easily digestible phosphates, which include most phosphate-containing additives. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of heat‐ and pressure processing on complete wet pet food with and without added inorganic phosphates. It was found that canning reduces the highly soluble phosphate, which was identified in identical raw samples. Thus, canning seems to lead to a certain masking of the added phosphates in the analysis method used.

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Why is it important?

As long as it is not legally required to label the use of phosphate-containing additives and not done voluntarily by the pet food industry, a method to detect inorganic phosphate in pet food is important to allow an informed choice for pet owners and veterinarians alike. It is necessary to test the detection method on products that have been processed differently.