Dog food brand Years have recalled all their food due to one of its ingredients, buckwheat, being linked to causing eye damage in dogs. Buckwheat was introduced earlier this year, to replace quinoa in its recipes.

Years have issued a statement containing the following:

Further independent laboratory testing around the buckwheat supply is ongoing. Years has chosen to voluntarily recall the meals as a precautionary measure, without causation having yet been proven.

As of 9pm on 18th August, 192 customers in total have reported potential, as yet unverified, eye issues out of approximately 40,000 customers.

We know for some, this will strike as overly cautious - but at Years, we will always put every dog's health and wellbeing first.

I find the statement irritating. Citing 192 out of 40,000 comes across as trivialising the issue as being unlikely to affect anyone in particular, but the statistic is obviously incomplete because most people would not have linked an eye issue to their dogs' diets, so why even cite it in the first place? It's junk filler in the statement, which leads me onto my next point, that buckwheat (along with quinoa) is a bizarre ingredient in a dog food and seems like something that only gets included to bulk up the volume. It was perhaps not reasonable to foresee eye damage resulting from including buckwheat, but I doubt that the dogs' health was the main concern when selecting buckwheat as a part of the food. Recalling the food is not "overly cautious" or "precautionary", it's a late reactionary measure to a mistake that was made months ago.

Choosing dog food is a frustrating experience fraught with unexpected complexity. If you try researching it, you'll quickly end up on All About Dog Food (AADF), which supposedly independently analyses and rates the quality of different dog food brands. With all the attention on Years, it has also transpired that the founder of Years, Darren Beale, was on the board of AADF, and AADF didn't disclose this. Navigating dog food is difficult enough for consumers without having to unravel undisclosed conflicts of interest in the information provided. AADF exists as a legal entity in the UK and this is potentially in violation of various UK consumer protection laws.

My dog has briefly been on Years in the past (in part due to its ranking on AADF!), but after this statement there's absolutely no chance he'll ever be on it in the future (in the unlikely event the company survives), nor anything else Mr Beale is involved in.

There are a lot of very strong opinions on the best way to feed a dog, but fact based information is much harder to come by.

Some brands, which I won't name, push science based meal formation. The word "science" should trigger suspicion when used for marketing or politics. Recall back in 2020 when dealing with the initial COVID outbreak, Boris Johnson proudly announced he was "following the science", which led to such brilliant statements as "there's no evidence masks help" and "there's no evidence you can catch COVID by being within a few metres of someone for a while". Those statements were scientifically true whilst also being completely wrong, and, let's be honest, obviously contrary to common knowledge concerning similar viruses. Science is a great thing, but scientific knowledge and lack thereof can be framed in a very misleading manner by marketers.

The brands advertising science tend to be kibble based, which should raise eyebrows. Kibble is ultra processed, and ultra processed foods in humans do not deliver good outcomes over the long term. It would be surprising if the opposite was true in dogs. As far as I can tell, none of the "backed by science" brands have published long term studies showing the long term health outcomes of dogs on their diets, but they do publish short term studies. If you looked at the health effects of eating McDonald's every day on a 15 year old over 12 weeks, you would probably conclude that McDonald's was fairly healthy. But over 40 years, the conclusion may not be so favourable. A cynical customer might find it suspicious that these brands use the word "science" to market their products, but refrain from scientific investigation into long term real world outcomes.

It's quite hard to reason confidently about exactly what makes up a quality dog food because dogs are in a strange place evolutionarily. Wild dogs tend to be opportunistic carnivores and scavengers with heavily meat based diets. So should dogs eat mainly meat? Probably, but domesticated dogs are the result of many generations of selective breeding in human settlements, sharing humans' food, which would have included a lot of plants and grains. My intuition says that until the wide availability of commercial dog food they probably would have supplemented their own diet with rats and mice and similar as well as scavenged quite a lot of butchers' waste animal parts that humans wouldn't eat. So, yes, my guess is that a dog's diet should be mainly meat based, but they can probably tolerate plant based food reasonably well too.

There is some discussion regarding dogs on grain-free diets contracting heart problems (Dilated Cardiomyopathy) but the exact mechanism is unclear. The current beliefs are that it's not the lack of grains that causes the issue, but the fact the grains are often replaced with high quantities of things like chickpeas, lentils, etc and (generally complete) animal proteins are replaced by (generally incomplete) plant proteins. In any case, the picture is unclear and likely goes beyond the presence of grains. This doesn't stop people on social media from confidently stating that non-kibble diets cause heart problems, though.

The currently available evidence for the superiority of kibble versus raw, wet, fresh or any other nutritionally complete formulation is pretty patchy. This doesn't mean that there is no practical difference between them, it means there isn't a whole lot of science being done that is generally relevant to consumer choices.

So, what should you feed your dog? I have no idea and neither does anyone else, but I choose dog food based on a few common sense points:

1. Ultra processed food is bad
2. Kibble is ultra processed
3. Raw food is clearly more tolerable for dogs than humans, but it still potentially contains parasites and disease
4. Handling raw food is a risk for humans, and whilst the dogs on raw diets may apparently remain healthy, they can still shed bacteria harmful to humans as a result of their diet