It is certainly ironic that the words palatant and pollutant sound so much alike. I smile, even with a sigh, when I see them used in ways that look like puns (at least to me) or near homonyms. The first word (palatant) refers to the ingredients added to foods (mostly pet foods) to make them more edible. The second word (pollutant) is more obvious, it refers to toxic substances.
Palatants are big business. They have been added by the bucketful to the many bags of foods lining our pet stores. This sounds terrible (and more of that anon) but it also keeps pet foods affordable. Imagine the cost of feeding your favorite animals fresh food all the time. But I have to admit that reading the list of ingredients on pet foods is surprising and unsettling. I have a bag of cat kibbles in front of me with a palatant listed as the first ingredient followed by a string of plant-based edibles such as: corn gluten, ground corn, brewers rice, soybean hulls, etc. It’s amazing what we can get our pets to eat.
Part of the problem is shelf life. Pet foods often have fats and proteins added in ways that are subject to all kinds of saprophytes, including molds and bacteria. Antibiotics and other mold inhibitors become necessary in order to keep them under control. But the additives aren’t normally things your pet wants to eat. Adding chemicals to cover them up keeps them on store shelves and in your pantry for the months that the industry requires.
I became interested in these additives when I learned that there are just a handful that get used over and over again, and it occurred to me that we do the same thing to our own foods. Almost every processed food option we have contains some sort of additive to make it appealing. Most of the time these include refined sugar, salt or a fat of some sort. And, just as with pet foods, these few ingredients make up the bulk of the business. I decided to start calling these human food additives palatants in order to stop pretending that our foods are any more special than pet foods.
Not all pet foods need palatants. Pet foods that are moist, for example, are appealing to pets without additives. They are defined as products with over 65% moisture. They normally contain meat, meat by-products, or fish. Our pets love them; but, after they are opened, they don’t stay edible for very long (even in the refrigerator). They are also more expensive.
Semi-moist pet foods have a moisture content of between 20 and 65%. They often contain meat products like moist pet foods but generally have farinaceous ingredients added as well (such as wheat, oats, or other grains). Some of these products have palatants added to make them more edible to carnivorous pets, but this market is small compared to overall sales.
It is the dry pet food market that is the real motivator for manufacturers. In 2020, sales for these products exceeded $5 billion (per year) in the US alone. It isn’t that our pets love dry food. They sell because they are cheaper than the other options and because our pets tolerate them. To be fair, sometimes our pets actually enjoy eating them. And the reason they eat them is because they have been manipulated with palatants.
Various amino acids or amino acid mixes have been used for a long time to make pet foods more palatable. Slaughterhouse waste materials have also been used extensively. Animal digest (or partially hydrolyzed animal parts) is how much of this waste is described after it is partially processed at a slaughterhouse or abattoir (Samant, et al., 2021). But it doesn’t take too much thought to make the connection between these manipulated foods and nutritional deficits. I suspect that part of the reason our dogs remain healthy for as long as they do is because their diets get supplemented by our dinner-table discards.
Which brings me to the problem of human palatants and nutritional deficits in our own diets. There are human populations on our planet that eat animal digest just like our pets do. I remember walking through an outdoor market in southern Spain 40 years ago and wondering about the dark brown sausages hanging from the meat rafters. I was surprised to learn that they were blood sausages, and I admit to affecting a certain stoicism on the occasions when a friend would serve them to us for dinner. That said, I am also somewhat relieved that this sort of fare is unlawful in America.
I don’t mean by this that our American nutritional standards are worthy of emulation. Far from it. Maybe we don’t sell slaughterhouse offal but we certainly hide an enormous amount of food behind addicting flavor-enhancers when our own bodies, if left to decide the matter on their own, would never touch these foods.
Let me give an example. I am a recovering corn chip addict. Once I start eating a few chips it can be difficult to stop. Corn chips were a sort of comfort food when I had to give up wheat and wheat products. Corn, potatoes, and rice became my go-to choices. Then one day a few years ago I read Fred Provenzas book about animal feeding preferences and I had a bit of an epiphany. I discovered that I don’t really crave corn. It is the mix of corn, salt and fats that keep me addicted. If I consult my body about eating plain corn tortillas, the answer I get is a definite, “not interested.” But if I think about eating brand name corn chips, the answer is a definite, “yes.” The only difference is that the commercial brands have successfully masked the real food. I understood immediately that my own bodily instincts have been effectively silenced by addicting palatants.
Provenza spent much of his professional career watching different animals eat in the wild. One of his key takeaways is that animals don’t want to eat the same things every day. They lack the food habits that many of us develop. The equivalent of brand-name fidelity doesn’t exist for them. The reason for this diversity of foods is quite basic. It comes down to the first principle of toxicology: that the poison depends on the concentration. For plant-eating animals, in particular, this means that plant chemicals can be both nutritious and toxic at the same time. It matters how much of them you eat. If a deer wakes up with a hunger for sagebrush, it might only take a couple of hours of browsing before its body sends signals to stop, and start looking for other food options. The deer is obedient to this signal. It listens to its body. The phrase that David Montgomery and Anne Bikle use to describe this signaling is “body wisdom.” But it only works because there are very few addicting substances in a deer’s diet - at least there are very few in the wild.
The surprising thing (and the troubling thing) is that you can get an animal, including the human animal, to eat all kinds of things if you coat them with addicting flavors. You can get dogs to eat grain by coating it with a thin layer of animal digest. And you can get humans to eat all kinds of inflammatory foods if you mix them with refined sugars, salt, and fats. More troubling still is that we eat these pseudo-foods day in and day out because we are creatures of habit. Over time these poor choices come back to make us chronically and even mortally ill.
So what would our diets look like if we removed the addicting palatants? If we removed, that is, the extra sugars, bleached flours, cheap fats and all the salt? I can tell from first hand experience that the first sensations are not pleasant. We crave these things and our bodies insist that we head back to the store and get more - immediately - if we presume to start eating well. But if we have willpower and stick with our better food choices, things begin to change. Over time, the body feels lighter, less hungry, and full of energy. And just as amazing is the fact that we start tasting natural foods with pleasure.
The classic study of what our natural feeding habits would look like if we removed all the palatants was conducted by Clara Davis, a Chicago pediatrician, in the 1930’s. She provided young orphaned children that were just weaned (ages six to eleven months of age) with 34 food and beverage options throughout the day. None of the foods was processed and none was mixed with other foods. They were just prepared appropriately (usually finely chopped or cooked) and placed in bowls from which the children could choose what they felt like eating at the time.
The foods provided for each meal consisted of such things as milk, apples, carrots, spinach, potatoes, oatmeal, barley, beef, chicken, bone jelly, bread, kidneys, fish, etc. Nurses were available to help spoon items onto bowls and plates and into cups, but they did not encourage the children’s choices in any way. Remarkably, this study continued for six years, and the results were certainly unexpected.
The children chose from the provided items irregularly, and they didn’t fall into habits of eating only the sweetest choices (like fruit). They acted somewhat like Provenza’s wild animals that were picky browsers. If they decided to eat plenty of potatoes one meal, they often skipped them the next. If they were recovering from an illness, they wanted more beef, carrots and beets. Sometimes, for no obvious reason, a child would eat an unexpected item and then leave it alone for days.
Davis wrote: “There were no failures of infants to manage their own diets; all had hearty appetites; all throve. Constipation was unknown among them and laxatives were never used or needed.”
This sort of study is no longer done. It was an experiment conducted on humans without their consent. Thankfully, this is now against the law. That said, it has certainly been a valuable window into some of the major dietary faults of Western society. Davis, of course, has had her detractors but one thing really stands out to me. It is about the pitfalls of palatants. The major one, I believe, is that they coax into the trap of bad eating habits.
Sometimes these habits don’t seem bad at all. We may even be proud of how well we are eating - following all the best dietary advice. The problem is that we are all different and we need to be listening to our own body wisdom - even if it is contrary to the best general advice at times. One very serious problem of Western diets is that they take body wisdom out of the equation - masking it with addicting palatants.
Sugars, fats, and salts are the main offenders. The need for these basic items is hard-wired into our bodies. They are so important that, over evolutionary time, we are attracted to them automatically. Before the major agricultural revolutions, this was never a problem because these items were not universally available. When we found them, we needed to get what we could. Now they are abundant, all the time. And their surfeit is becoming a major problem that we can only overcome with education and enough willpower to withstand the many industrial temptors blandishing their addicting artificial foods.
In a word, they are palatants, plain and simple. Our pets love them and so do we. And we are in denial. We have convinced ourselves that they are so benign that we can even feed our children meals consisting - sometimes exclusively - of refined carbs. Our favorite celebration is a Halloween with its mountains of candy (and headaches, hyperactive kids, and the predisposition for insulin resistance). It’s time to take off the mask and eat real foods (as Michael Pollan would say) and let our bodies tell us what we should really be eating.
References
Davis, Clara M. (1939). Results of the self-selection of diets by young children. The Canadian Medical Association Journal 41(3), 257-261.
Montgomery, David R. and Anne Bikle. (2022). What your food ate, how to heal our land and reclaim our health. W.W. Norton & Company.
Pollan, Michael. (2008). In defense of food: an eater’s manifesto. Penguin Press, New York.
Provenza, Fred. (2018). Nourishment, what animals can teach us about rediscovering our nutritional wisdom. Chelsea Green Publishing. White River Junction, Vermont and London, UK.
Samant, Shilpa S.,Philip G. Crandall, Sara E. J. Arroyo, and Han-Seok Seo. (2021). Dry pet food flavor enhancers and their impact on palatability: a review. Foods 10, 2599 (19 pages).
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