Alessandro Di Cerbo

By Alessandro Di Cerbo, Federica Pezzuto, Gianandrea Guidetti and Sergio Canello

Functional foods provide health benefits if they are consumed on regular basis. Some nutraceutical pet diets have been demonstrated to exert health benefits in vitro and in vivo while also exhibiting palatability to the animals. The aim of this chapter is to provide an overall update of commercially available pet diets with proven efficacy against pathologies with an inflammatory background. Research on pet food is still scarce and biased. The ultimate success of functional pet foods will depend on delivering bioactive components in a predictable and assured manner to effectively reduce the risk of disease and/or support the body. Our investigations outlined the improved health status of sick dogs by means of a commercially available nutraceutical pet diet approach. Therefore, additional investigations into the consumption of functional foods in domestic animal nutrition should be done in order to study dietary interventions for disease prevention and treatment.

Part of the book: Superfood and Functional Food

By Sergio Canello, Alessandro Di Cerbo and Gianandrea Guidetti

Severe adverse reactions of the organism to environmental elements have been dizzily rising in humans and pets over the last 50 years. Such reactions can be expulsive (vomit, diarrhea, dandruff, and abundant secretion or excretion) or driven by an inflammatory process (which has been considered as healing process) in charge to destroy every toxic introduced into the body. Thus, it is clear that if a contaminated food is assumed daily, the inflammatory process becomes inevitably chronic. Most common inflammatory processes of dogs and cats originate from this condition, which we observed to be frequently caused by well-defined contaminants: toxic residues of oxytetracycline (OTC). In fact, once everything containing in this compound is eliminated, all inflammatory processes tend to rapidly and spontaneously regress. Here, we reviewed and discussed the problem related to the amount of pharmacological and chemical substances, which are used to increase the production of fruits, vegetables, intensive farming-derived meat and fish, milk, eggs, and grain. Such substances can persist within the products in variable amount and, gradually or rapidly (often in a few hours), poison the organism causing reactions such as allergies, anaphylactic shocks (not so frequent), autoimmune diseases (fortunately not so frequent but continuously increasing), and inflammatory processes, the most common reaction. In this context, nutrition, as a daily and frequent habit, should be taken seriously into account; given that wild animals do not seem to have the same pathologic reactions, there are no doubts that many foods deriving from intensive farming have become a poison rather than a remedy.

Part of the book: Antibiotic Use in Animals