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| Pet Food Innovations: Hypoallergenic Diets Posted: 07 Dec 2009 11:30 AM PST
It's about the innovation I told him. It proves that pet food can play a big role in the management of disease and it demonstrates that Purina, a company better known for its size, can be on the cutting edge of nutrition science. Upon reflection, he seemed pleased with the answer. Or maybe he was thinking something along the lines of, "Typical response for a vet." A couple of years before we introduced what is now called HA (Hypoallergenic) Canine Formula, a couple of the research scientists and I had developed an interest in the mechanisms of food allergy. We wanted to know why certain dogs developed allergies to food and what it was about the food that caused allergy. We thought if we understood the process better we might be able to do something about it with diet. At that time food allergy was managed by a process of elimination that identified the offending food substance. Once identified, that substance was eliminated from the diet. The problem with this approach was that it did not address the fundamental problem. Dogs with food allergy have some inherited defect in their gut that causes them to react to certain types of protein. It takes time for them to develop a hypersensitivity to that protein and over time many dogs exhibit allergies to the new protein source. That led us to think that it was something about the structure of protein as opposed to the source of the protein; beef, chicken, lamb etc., that caused the hypersensitivity reaction. Then we had the ah-ha moment. We were attending a nutrition meeting on the west coast largely to hear from one scientist, a veterinary nutritionist, who had been studying protein structure and food allergy. His work indicated that it was the size of the protein molecule that was responsible for the allergic reaction not the specific protein source. He also hypothesized that if you could physically alter the size of the protein molecule through a process called hydrolysis, the protein would no longer cause allergy. We went back to St Louis and got to work. We tried various chemical processes with our existing protein sources to reduce their molecular weight, or size of the protein molecule. We had limited success with this and the process was very costly. We started looking elsewhere for the right protein. We knew that human infants that were allergic to milk protein did well when switched to a substitute using soy protein. We contacted various soy protein manufacturers and found that they had something called isolated soy protein with a molecular weight consistently below 12,000 daltons. We knew that intact proteins over 18,000 daltons in size were largely responsible for food allergy. We had our protein source. The problem then became one of food technology and formulation. We needed a complete pet food, one with very few ingredients, that used soy protein as its base that could be made into a kibble for dog food. That took almost as much time as the original protein research but our food technologists were up to the challenge. HA formula is a single source protein diet, basically a vegetarian diet, that involves about four key ingredients: Isolated soy protein, vegetable oil and canola oil, low antigen starch for carbohydrate and cellulose for fiber. Vitamins and minerals make up the bulk of HA. This unique formula is useful for a host of problems related to digestive tract ailments in addition to food allergy. HA is helpful in the management of pancreatitis, pancreatic insufficiency, malabsorption, lymphangiectasia, hyperlipidemia and inflammatory bowel disease. Alice is eating a hypoallergenic diet for her inflammatory bowel disease and it's working out well for her. Every time we try to switch her back to a "normal" diet she starts to vomit again. HA formula may just be the smallest volume diet Purina makes. It's sold only through vets and as you can see, used only in certain circumstances. Compared to something like Dog Chow or Beneful or Purina ONE it is really tiny in terms of sales for Purina. That's one way to measure things. In terms of innovation though, it's huge. Ever since the introduction of HA veterinarians have looked at Purina through different eyes. Instead of the biggest and oldest, the see the power of innovation. That makes them take a second look at our other products and we see that in their recommendations for products like Pro Plan and Purina ONE for healthy dogs and cats. I've got the framed patent for HA formula in my office at home now. My name is there along with that of the other two scientists that worked on the project. Purina owns the patent of course, but the three of us made it happen. I'm still proud of that. |
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