Most of my social interaction comes from work these days. I should probably seek out a more diverse friend group, but there are only so many hours in the day. In recent weeks, I’ve been working alongside an older gentleman we’ll call Chris. We’ll call him that because that’s his name. Chris is a dog person, and has kept pitbulls as pets for most of his adult life. I have cats, so we have a good time talking about how each one’s choice of pet doesn’t make sense to the other.
One day, while we’re at our workstations in the shop, Chris sends me an email with a link he says I should find useful. It appears to take me to a lengthy address that includes “catfoodexposed.com” in the URL. If Chris weren’t in the room for me to ask personally, I would have suspected this was an attempt by the company’s IT team to test my email scrutinising skills. Chris says he thinks I’ll want to read it since I have cats.
Ignoring the “catfoodexposed” domain name – which is both amusingly specific and worryingly conspiratorial – I follow the link to see what could be so enigmatic about kitty kibble. I’m immediately met with a banner at the head of the page labeling itself an “advertorial”, and a quick scan of the page shows common indicators of quackery. The first and most obvious is the disclaimers telling the reader not to take it seriously:
That should be enough to call it, but we’re having a slow day at the office. The headline does little to allay my suspicions; “Health Concerns Surge Over ‘Sawdust’ Additive In Trusted Cat Food Brands”. By the second sentence, we’ve hit a claim sorely lacking a citation; “So why is it [sawdust] one of the most common ingredients found in cat food today?” I would expect any self-respecting journalist to back that up – perhaps with a list of ingredient labels from major manufacturers wherein the top ingredients include “sawdust”, or some euphemism for sawdust. Strangely, no such evidence is provided.
This piece from veterinary doctor Martin Goldstein is intended to tell the reader that their pet’s food is filled with sawdust, a fact that is being cleverly hidden by manufacturers, who instead label the additive as “powdered cellulose.” In fact, the piece’s assertion that powdered cellulose is sawdust isn’t even substantiated. Since the author didn’t feel like explaining, I looked it up myself. Turns out powdered cellulose is all over the place. It’s commonly used for its absorptive properties and as a filler to give food products a desired texture, and has little impact on the thing that eats it. The EFSA even re-evaluated the additive in 2018, and that report’s abstract concludes, “there would be no safety concern at the reported uses and use levels for the unmodified and modified celluloses…” since the additives are passed completely through the digestive track without any caloric effect.
Six sentences in, we hit yet another major issue: “After discovering how devastating filler ingredients can be to your cat’s health…” Here’s another place where a citation wouldn’t just be helpful, but arguably required. Where are these discoveries documented? How do we know that pet health is directly related to filler ingredients? How devastating are the additives? You’re the expert, Dr. Marty, show me! The rest of that sentence is almost a punchline. One might expect a medical expert in this position to launch a campaign to take food manufacturers to task, file a class-action suit on behalf of pet parents, or even offer services to pet owners affected by substandard foods. Dr. Goldstein “created a free video report…” How generous of him.
Passingly, I find it amusing that this piece (I won’t call it an article, since its own disclaimer says it isn’t an article) is written for and on Dr. Goldstein’s website, and it uses quotes from him as though he were an outside expert brought in to share his expertise. He’s even quoted in the piece as saying, “I have a special nickname for these kinds of ingredients at my clinic: Cat Health Destroyers.” Firstly, the special nickname doesn’t seem special or clever, and Dr. Marty really whiffed on a good zinger; secondly, Dr. Goldstein retired from practice four years before this piece was written, so I wonder if his only clinical involvement is catchphrases at this point.
The piece goes on, providing an anecdote from Dr. Goldstein, stating that his pet cat lived for 24 years, followed by another testimonial with no attribution. Two personal accounts do not make for compelling medical evidence, especially when we don’t even know where one of them came from. In this whole piece – all sixteen sentences of it – nothing of substance has been presented, but disclaimers were offered to inform the reader that this isn’t a real article, nor is it real medicine.
After Googling “Martin Goldstein”, I found his page on the Foundation for Alternative and Integrative Medicine, which is not a place I would hope to find my veterinarian. On that page, Dr. Goldstein’s accreditations include a certificate from the International Veterinary Acupuncture Society. Regular readers of The Skeptic probably don’t need to be convinced that acupuncture is, in a word, bunk.
The next paragraph is even worse; it implies that Dr. Goldstein’s methods are effective for “treating chronic and degenerative illnesses, especially cancer.” Alternative medicine commonly claims to cure or treat cancer while offering no evidence of efficacy. These operations regularly draw in people in emotionally vulnerable positions – such as a loved one or pet suffering from cancer – to make easy and recurring sales of products and services that do nothing for the patient. Dr. Goldstein avoids making a direct assertion that his treatments cure cancer, which is good since that would be illegal, but I think he’s playing with fire here.
I must confess, I’ve buried the lede. The thrust of Dr. Goldstein’s advertorial is that our pets are eating powdered cellulose, and that is detrimental to their health, so we should place our trust in vets who know how pet food is formulated to protect our four-legged friends from harm. But the research seems to say that powdered cellulose is safe to eat. We could intuit this outcome by just considering what “powdered cellulose” means. It means plant matter that has been finely granulated. If plant matter was harmful in our food, then vegetables would be lethal.
At the end of all that, suffice it to say that I am not convinced. The content of the piece is threadbare and wholly unsupported, its assertions are misleading, and frankly, the whole thing smells like a sales pitch. The author refuses to show where the data are coming from, the core concept of the piece dissolves under scrutiny (given that all plants contain cellulose), and for the two anecdotal citations in support of the claims, I could just as easily offer more than two anecdotes of perfectly healthy pets that eat sawdust-ridden food.
I think I am a conscientious pet parent who takes the health of their pets seriously. They are, after all, members of my family. But that intent to take their health seriously brings a responsibility to make informed decisions on their behalf, and I don’t get the impression that Dr. Marty is giving me much information.
