Makers Of Raw Food - Be Wary Of Bone % Info Found On The Internet!

Tuckamukk3

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Hi all. I just registered with this website to write this, so I don't even know if I'm posting this in the right place.... but I just wanted to somehow share this important info with the raw feeding community.
I'm new to making raw food, and brand new to grinding bone; in fact my grinder just arrived in the mail a couple days ago and I haven't even used it yet.... but before even figuring out how to use it I needed to figure out how to calculate bone properly.
This is where I ran into a lack of information problem because the standard recipes only give you an easy calculation for chicken thighs (remove 20 - 25% of the bones). I've also read (on feline-nutrition.org) that bone should make up 7 - 10% in weight of the recipe.
I know I'll be using cornish hens a lot so I set out to find what percentage of bone is in a whole cornish hen. I searched the Internet and found multiple references to the same "fact"; over and over again I come across statements that cornish hens are 39% bone.*** HERE'S WHERE THE ALARM BELLS GO OFF!*** I had deboned a cornish hen just once before but even without careful measuring, it was obvious that little carcass was NOWHERE NEAR 39% bone.

So tonight I did what I had to do to get a fairly accurate calculation of bone % in cornish hen. I weighed a whole cornish hen - it was 27 ounces, or 1 lb 11 oz. I carefully cut away as much meat as possible from the skeleton of a cornish hen, to use later. Then what I couldn't cut away I scrubbed away with a small, metal bristled barbecue brush until I'd removed almost all of the meat bits from the bone (there were some small amounts I could not remove from the spine and ribs). I then weighed the skeleton. It weighed 5 ounces. Considering there were still some tiny bits of meat in places, I'm assuming the actual weight of the skeleton to be about 4 - 4.5 ounces.

I did the math. The result? This cornish hen was only about 16% bone!!! NOWHERE NEAR the 39% that is proclaimed all over the Internet. The really alarming thing is that PEOPLE ARE USING THESE INNACURATE PIECES OF DATA TO (MIS)CALCULATE THEIR BONE TO PHOSPHORUS RATIOS. I read numerous old threads (one on this website) where people stated they were using the 39% bone figure as a fact when using cornish hen, and calculating their calcium and meat amounts around that figure. One person was openly pondering that it didn't "seem like enough" bone.

The moral of the story is: Do your own research when something doesn't seem right, or if you're not sure. DON'T trust the charts you find online or anywhere else about the %'s of bone in various cuts of meat, if they can be that wrong. I read somewhere else that rabbits were 9.5 % bone, but Ive heard that rabbits are particularly bony, and the one time I ate rabbit it seemed to have a Ton of bone in it, so that figure looks Way Off to me too. Probably a good idea to dissect - at least ONCE - the particular brands and cuts of meat you're going to use frequently to calculate the % of bone in each. (FYI, the brand of cornish hen I'm using is Patti Jean) I'm sure bone percentage varies to some degree from animal to animal based on various factors, but this particular discrepancy is SO blatantly extreme that it defies basic common sense. I mean 39% is close to half.... I can't image that ANY edible bird has Ever been made up of almost half its body weight in bone. Unless it was starving to death.

I hope this helps somebody out there to avoid potentially dangerous mistakes in calculating the bone % in their homemade food. I just wanted to get the word out.
 

Wile

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Hi all. I just registered with this website to write this, so I don't even know if I'm posting this in the right place.... but I just wanted to somehow share this important info with the raw feeding community.
I'm new to making raw food, and brand new to grinding bone; in fact my grinder just arrived in the mail a couple days ago and I haven't even used it yet.... but before even figuring out how to use it I needed to figure out how to calculate bone properly.
This is where I ran into a lack of information problem because the standard recipes only give you an easy calculation for chicken thighs (remove 20 - 25% of the bones). I've also read (on feline-nutrition.org) that bone should make up 7 - 10% in weight of the recipe.
I know I'll be using cornish hens a lot so I set out to find what percentage of bone is in a whole cornish hen. I searched the Internet and found multiple references to the same "fact"; over and over again I come across statements that cornish hens are 39% bone.*** HERE'S WHERE THE ALARM BELLS GO OFF!*** I had deboned a cornish hen just once before but even without careful measuring, it was obvious that little carcass was NOWHERE NEAR 39% bone.

So tonight I did what I had to do to get a fairly accurate calculation of bone % in cornish hen. I weighed a whole cornish hen - it was 27 ounces, or 1 lb 11 oz. I carefully cut away as much meat as possible from the skeleton of a cornish hen, to use later. Then what I couldn't cut away I scrubbed away with a small, metal bristled barbecue brush until I'd removed almost all of the meat bits from the bone (there were some small amounts I could not remove from the spine and ribs). I then weighed the skeleton. It weighed 5 ounces. Considering there were still some tiny bits of meat in places, I'm assuming the actual weight of the skeleton to be about 4 - 4.5 ounces.

I did the math. The result? This cornish hen was only about 16% bone!!! NOWHERE NEAR the 39% that is proclaimed all over the Internet. The really alarming thing is that PEOPLE ARE USING THESE INNACURATE PIECES OF DATA TO (MIS)CALCULATE THEIR BONE TO PHOSPHORUS RATIOS. I read numerous old threads (one on this website) where people stated they were using the 39% bone figure as a fact when using cornish hen, and calculating their calcium and meat amounts around that figure. One person was openly pondering that it didn't "seem like enough" bone.

The moral of the story is: Do your own research when something doesn't seem right, or if you're not sure. DON'T trust the charts you find online or anywhere else about the %'s of bone in various cuts of meat, if they can be that wrong. I read somewhere else that rabbits were 9.5 % bone, but Ive heard that rabbits are particularly bony, and the one time I ate rabbit it seemed to have a Ton of bone in it, so that figure looks Way Off to me too. Probably a good idea to dissect - at least ONCE - the particular brands and cuts of meat you're going to use frequently to calculate the % of bone in each. (FYI, the brand of cornish hen I'm using is Patti Jean) I'm sure bone percentage varies to some degree from animal to animal based on various factors, but this particular discrepancy is SO blatantly extreme that it defies basic common sense. I mean 39% is close to half.... I can't image that ANY edible bird has Ever been made up of almost half its body weight in bone. Unless it was starving to death.

I hope this helps somebody out there to avoid potentially dangerous mistakes in calculating the bone % in their homemade food. I just wanted to get the word out.
Thanks for posting this warning Tuckamukk3 Tuckamukk3 . It is a good reminder for those of us who make cat food. I don't use bone in my food, but out of curiosity next time I prepare my rabbit food I'll debone it and see what I end up with for a meat:bone:liver:kidney ratio (those are the parts included in the rabbits I buy).
 

mschauer

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That's one of the reasons why I don't use bone in my foods. It's very difficult to really know how much bone you really have.

The 39% number you see comes from the USDA database. It represents an average for cornish game hens typically found in markets. The hens you have could well have less, or more, than this average.

But just because your hens are lower in bone than the average doesn't mean that would be true for all hens.

Common sense should tell us there can't be a single, precise, number that accurately represents the amount of bone in every bone-in product we use.

The only way to know for sure how much bone you have is to do what you did and meticulously strip away all the meat from the frame and measure what is left. And who wants to do that for every protein source they use?
 
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mschauer

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Thanks for posting this warning Tuckamukk3 Tuckamukk3 . It is a good reminder for those of us who make cat food. I don't use bone in my food, but out of curiosity next time I prepare my rabbit food I'll debone it and see what I end up with for a meat:bone:liver:kidney ratio (those are the parts included in the rabbits I buy).
Rabbit is a particular problem when it comes to bone. How much meat a rabbit has varies greatly with species and, of course, with how it is raised.
 

mschauer

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The really alarming thing is that PEOPLE ARE USING THESE INNACURATE PIECES OF DATA TO (MIS)CALCULATE THEIR BONE TO PHOSPHORUS RATIOS.
I assume you mean calcium to phosphorus ratio. That is another reason I don't use bone. I've never found any data I considered reliable that could be used to calculate the amount of calcium and phosphorus in the bone I might use.
 

mschauer

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Oh, and for what it's worth, I've separated the meat, skin and bone from chicken thighs and found the information from the USDA database to be very close to what I buy locally. Same for the amount of fat on chicken hearts. But, YMMV. Just showing that averages may be representative of what you use and they may not be.
 
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Tuckamukk3

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Yeah, I thought that data came from the USA, must have read it somewhere. You would expect some variance, but not that much - at least I didn't. I suppose I should do this with chicken thighs too because I think mine are meatier than the USDA averages, but of course it's much less labor-intensive than with a cornish hen. I think I'm going to utilize both with-bone and without-bone recipes in order to balance out possible calcium/phosphorus variations in my with-bone batches, while I continue to research and educate myself further.
 
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Tuckamukk3

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Oops, I mean USDA, not USA.
 

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Thank you for doing that experiment, Tuckamukk3.

I figured (plus did a bit of experimenting to weigh bone content) that there is a lot of natural variation in bone percentage. Some variety isn't really a problem as long as it evens out over time, as for time immemorial I'm pretty sure cats were not getting precisely fixed percentages of bone in their diets, and they survived just fine.

My main barometer is my cats' poop. When they get too much bone, e.g. if I feed them undiluted rabbit grinds, their poop gets whitish. I take this to mean that if you start getting much over 10% you'll be able to detect this easily, and I can definitely tell when they got 15%. For the opposite end (presumably under 7%), stools start getting soft, moist and a bit smelly. In that situation I start feeding less boneless.

FWIW, I have wondered if Hare today chicken and turkey grinds really are 27% bone. The original chickens may be, but the grinds don't include the heads & necks which contain a lot of bone, and some of the larger bones may get stuck in the machinery and not make it into the final grind.
 
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Tuckamukk3

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Thanks for the information about the effect of different bone percentages on their stool. I'll remember that.
And yeah, Im sure cats in the wild would have a fair amount of fluctuation in their diet. I haven't come across any healthy Range specified for bone percentages, usually just the figure 10%; feline-nutrition.org says 7-10%... I figure if I aim for 9 - 10% the variations should even out.
I've also wondered how accurate the bone % of meat/bone/organ pregrounds can really be, but fortunately or unfortunately I can't afford them anyway right now, so that's one thing I don't yet have to wonder about.
 

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My main barometer is my cats' poop. When they get too much bone, e.g. if I feed them undiluted rabbit grinds, their poop gets whitish. I take this to mean that if you start getting much over 10% you'll be able to detect this easily, and I can definitely tell when they got 15%. For the opposite end (presumably under 7%), stools start getting soft, moist and a bit smelly. In that situation I start feeding less boneless.
Too much bone will indeed make a cat's stool hard and dry (and whitish) but it is a myth that we can determine if the diet contains too little bone by looking at stool quality. A cat fed a diet completely lacking in bone will still have perfect stool unless something else is wrong.
 
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Tuckamukk3

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Well, that makes sense since it's the presence and fermentation of fiber that causes the smell and softness in cat stool. Since I'm new to this Im trying to take into consideration everybody's different experiences.
 

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The myth came about because it is known that too much bone will cause hard, dry stools. A lot of people just assumed the opposite is true; that too little bone would make the stool soft. The reason too much bone makes the stool hard is because bone is chock full of minerals and when too much bone is used the excess minerals are excreted in feces.

But the complete absence of bone in the diet won't make stools soft unless there is something else wrong. If a cat's stool is too soft increasing the bone may well firm the stool because of excess minerals being excreted but that doesn't mean the diet was previously lacking in bone. See the thing is, if someone doesn't understand that they may just go with the excess bone, thinking they have fixed the problem, when in reality they have only masked it. They won't even try to discover what the underlying problem really is.
 

kittyluv387

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The myth came about because it is known that too much bone will cause hard, dry stools. A lot of people just assumed the opposite is true; that too little bone would make the stool soft. The reason too much bone makes the stool hard is because bone is chock full of minerals and when too much bone is used the excess minerals are excreted in feces.

But the complete absence of bone in the diet won't make stools soft unless there is something else wrong. If a cat's stool is too soft increasing the bone may well firm the stool because of excess minerals being excreted but that doesn't mean the diet was previously lacking in bone. See the thing is, if someone doesn't understand that they may just go with the excess bone, thinking they have fixed the problem, when in reality they have only masked it. They won't even try to discover what the underlying problem really is.
Good point! Haven't thought of that before. More things to keep in mind..
 
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Tuckamukk3

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Mschauer, thank you for expounding that point. I didn't know there were medical conditions that could cause soft stools, but everything you said makes perfect sense.
 

mschauer

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It doesn't have to be a medical cause although IBD is known to cause loose stools. A very common cause of loose stools is the gut microbiome getting out of balance. Just switching foods, usually to or from dry food, can cause it. Giving antibiotics will also.
 
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