BY: DEXTER BROWN
The paleo diet is all the rage these days, but the pricey meat, eggs and vegetables it requires can easily put a strain on tight budgets. After being on it for a year, writer Anne Kadet was starting to feel the financial pinch.
“I love it and feel great. But all that fresh meat and produce costs a fortune,” she said of the diet in a post for OZY. “Plus, there’s a lot of cooking, and I have better things to do with my time.”
When she read the label of her dog’s kibble, however, Kadet realized that it technically fell in line with the expensive high protein, gluten-free and grain-free paleo diet. She also learned that the kibble had holistic ingredients and was fortified with omega-3, omega-6 and antioxidants. Oh, and a whole kibble meal cost less than a dollar. With that in mind, Kadet did what anyone on a constricted budget would do: she announced to her friend that she planned to eat dog food for a week.
SEE ALSO: Could This Raw Food Diet Really Fight Cancer?
After she stuck with kibble and other dog food for six days, Kadet lost two pounds, noticed an uptick in energy and improved her blood sugar levels.
As you might expect, she didn’t find all the dog food palatable. On the first day she noted that the kibble had a dry, gritty, nutty and slightly sour taste. “Halfway through the bowl, my jaw gets tired,” she said in her post. “Dog food requires a lot of heavy-duty crunching.”
By day four, after she wolfed down Milk-Bones in public and snacked on a Boo Boo Berry dog cookie with the owner of a local pet supply store, Kadet discovered a line of dog food at PetSmart that was so much like human food that she felt compelled to call the store’s PR office to find out why. They declined to comment.
Kadet, however, soon found the diet’s downside. While she was able to find dog food that she didn’t mind eating, Kadet later found out that it was in fact more expensive than going paleo. After she spoke to a dog food professional, Kadet learned that dogs and humans have different needs. “Dogs make their own vitamin C. Humans do not,” she said in her post. “Dogs and people require different amino acids. Humans have a more efficient metabolism.”
So she decided to end her experiment, but if she were broke Kadet said she’d be more than willing to go back to kibble. “I’d choose to live on kibble over Kraft dinner or ramen noodles,” she wrote. “Surely, an all-in-one, high-end dog food is more nutritious than a diet of white flour and fat.”