Woman to eat pet food for a month

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I guessed wrong, I was thinking “blogger.” No offense to those at boingboing.

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Disappointing. I was expecting it to be about Ian Duncan Smith roping his wife into a PR exercise about how people on low incomes could feed their families.

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Ladies and gentlemen, this is what happens when you don’t hire a publicist because you think you can do the job yourself.

Oh, sure, she’s getting plenty of publicity, and she might get a few new customers amongst the more … Uh, shall we say gullible … pet owners. But most people are going to associate her with a gag reflex

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I do hope she’s married, because if she’s dating this is going to make for some awkward small-talk.

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If she ends up being right, I’d say it has more to do with the degradation of human food than anything else…but saying “pet food” is also, like the article briefly, vaguely, points out is describing a wiiiiide range of things. If she really is going to eat very select pet foods, she’ll probably be fine for a month, although her body will miss a lot of stuff that’s fit the human metabolism and not the dog or cat’s (assuming she was any kind of healthy eater before)… Her advice to “read the labels” is pretty weak. Pet food nutrition labeling is a pretty laissez-faire operation. Sure, they have to list foods in order by relative weight, but that’s easy enough to get around by labeling anything that comes form a chicken as “chicken” and split the filler crap into 10 categories, so they’re all listed at the bottom. Pet food nutrition labels are just advertising, but then again, so is she. I don’t expect honest results from her study-of-one either.

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I was informed while standing in line at the grocery store that you can indeed eat for $10 a week using milk and dog food. I didn’t ask which kind was the best. I’d assume something with chicken.

Considering no dog I’ve ever fed dog food to has died from malnutrition, and indeed we have a considerable amount of FAT pets in the US, then yes I would say dog food is reasonably nutritious.

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I always thought the TV show “Chopped” should feature pet food as a mystery ingredient.

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My guess, “mommy blogger”, was somewhat off

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“her brand of pet food is selected for its nutritional value and is free from animal by-products and preservatives.”

and probably much more expensive than just buying the cheap scraps of meat yourself. (sigh)

here in nyc, the pet stores have boutique $10 jars of “doggie peanut butter”. obscene or amusing? you decide.

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You smegging bastard! You beat me to it!

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There is always Bachelor Chow

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For a while, when I was about twelve, I used to sneak the occasional nugget of dry dog food and munch on it. Not much of a taste, but it didn’t kill me.

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Oh that reminds me. I used to do web work for Three Dog Bakery. They claimed all their treats were human edible, so I tried some. They were extremely bland and crunchy, but not bad, I guess.

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Different species have different nutritional needs. Her stunt will prove nothing. If you feed a cat a steady diet of dog food, it will eventually go blind as dogs can produce a certain amino acid that cats cannot so cat food has a lot more. (Taurine, I think)

All my cats have lived well past the statistical norms on commercial (mid range) cat food. (18 to 20 years) But if I ate it all the time, I’d probably have some serious health issues as vitamin and amino acid needs vary wildly. Chocolate or aspirin can kill a dog but that does not mean they are poisonous to us. Cows and hippos can eat stuff that would kill a human or at least not sustain him or her in a healthy manner.

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I was going to guess engineering or software, where dogfooding is actually a good thing.

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As the Reverend William Archibald Spooner might say, it looks like a stublicity punt.

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Erm, I spent a summer or so eating basically nothing but Purina Dog dry chow (for large dogs). It was that or starve. Wasn’t great, but it kept me alive. I did end up with rather firm stools though, but other than that, no noticeable harm. Probably better for you than, say, a steady diet of McDonald’s for the same period.

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If only.

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