I think it's safe to say that if human nutritionists could convince their clients to eat a specified amount of kibble each day, they'd do it in a heartbeat. We're dealing with an entirely different situation.
The only way we really know what a complete diet is for our animals is by doing scientific studies and looking at the indicators of health. We're never going to feed dogs their natural diet, are we? Innova's EVO has a very misleading claim to being an "ancestral" diet. It's basically a human diet without grain. Where are the mice and chipmunks?
There is a lot of hand-waving about the ingredients, but has anyone shown extruded chicken or beef to be remarkably better than soy meal and corn gluten? Since that's what you're trying to say, show me the evidence.
Could you point me to all these human nutritionists that you know that want us all to eat one standardized "complete and balanced" kibble? For one, the research on both human and animal nutrition seems to have a major shift every 5-10 years (ex: the importance of omega 3 fatty acids, the importance of taurine for large/giant breed dogs, etc), so I cannot imagine a nutritionist advocating that their complete and balanced human kibble is infallible. That's what you're basically saying when you proudly proclaim that one single food will work for an animal or human for the rest of their life, and that's just not what we know to work. Keeping it in perspective, commercial kibble for pets has only been around 50-60 years and only within the last 25 years has the vast majority of pets been on a commercial kibble instead of getting a home prepared diet or one the "pet" had to hunt itself. However did those poor hapless kitties ever manage all by themselves on a diet of mice and birds?
I think this is a good article about getting back to nutrition as a whole picture instead of trying to reinvent Mother Nature's wheel:
http://health.usnews.com/articles/h...iets-that-promote-health-and-always-have.html
And yeah, I do know people who feed dogs a whole prey model diet (I did this myself for several years before my hubby got laid off and it got too expensive), which is generally considered their "natural" diet. For me, this included green tripe, organ meat, bones, muscle meat, a fruit and veggie mix and a
small amount of grains or starches (rice, sweet potato, whole grain breads, etc). Basically trying to recreate the critters they ate plus a small amount of vegetation. I don't encourage them to eat mice as I have two rats that I'd like them to leave alone.
But I did offer them each a frozen/thawed mouse once (my snakes eat mice and rats, so I had a surplus). They weren't particularly interested, though they were very stinky mice.
I'm not sure why you see EVO as having a misleading claim. They have two formulations: one with chicken, turkey, and herring and another with beef, lamb, egg, venison, and bison. I don't know too many humans that eat those particular ingredients lists. Though what is wrong with them eating a "human" diet? Coppinger, Mech, and other wolf biologists think that the evolutionary ancestor of the dog could have been proto dog/wolves as late as 15,000 years to as early as about 100,000 years ago scavenging our kills and food as well as eating their own.
As far as plant protein versus animal protein, it's been known for likely decades that dogs and cats assimilate animal protein for bioavailability better than plant protein. I believe there is a chart on that in Small Animal Clinical Nutrition IV, though I don't have that book, so I can't give you a page number. That's not really something up for debate. They know this from studying the fecal volume and quality (what goes in versus how much comes back out) among other parameters. I would personally feed almost twice as much kibble on a grain heavy diet as a animal protein diet, even calories to calories (i.e.-I'd feed 3-3.5 cups of California Natural or Chicken Soup versus 6 cups of Ol' Roy, Beneful, or Pedigree to my dogs). I view ingredients as a symphony that work in concert, not a bunch of single notes.
Speaking of studies, I'm going to try to see if I can do a research project this summer on that subject with our nutrition professor. Perhaps weight loss in cats on a high animal protein, low/no grain species appropriate diet versus your "standard" high carb, high fiber weight loss kibble? Should be fun if we can get it done.
