This is an excerpt from the attached PDF written by Greg Aldrich, Ph.D. President, Pet Food and Ingredient Technology, Inc. about Rendered Products in Pet Food
Much of the lamb meal used in pet foods is derived from the lamb meat industry in Australia and New Zealand. Most of this lamb meal is rendered in a “low temperature” rendering process. Theoretically, the quality of the meal may be better because heat damage to the proteins is minimized. However, data to support or refute this hypothesis are lacking. Lamb meal is a species-specific category of meat meal, but, very little data are available in the public domain on the ingredient itself. Analytically, lamb meal mirrors the nutrient composition of meat (and bone) meal. Likewise, the protein quality of lamb meal is reported to be roughly comparable to meat and bone meal and about 75 percent of chicken by-product meal (Johnson and Parsons, 1997; Johnson et al., 1998). In the study by Johnson et al. (1998), ileal digestibility of the essential amino acids lysine and threonine and the nonessential sulfur amino acid Essential Rendering—Pet Nutrition—Aldrich 169 cystine were quite low in the lamb meal-containing diets. This may be due to contamination of the lamb meal with high levels of wool. Wool is high in sulfur amino acids like cystine, but its nutritional availability is low. This poor availability of cystine, a taurine precursor, may explain the taurine-associated dilated cardiomyopathy in certain breeds of dogs fed an otherwise nutritionally complete diet based on lamb meal and rice (Fascetti et al., 2003). Read More by Clicking on the PDF file below.
