Heart, Taurine, and Why We Never Changed a Thing

Last week we covered the lawsuit against Hill's Science Diet. This week: what the science actually says, and why it never touched our recipe.

It Was Never Really About Grain

Researchers found the diets linked to DCM cases were overwhelmingly legume-heavy — peas and lentils standing in for animal protein. Plant protein doesn't supply taurine. That's a formulation choice, not a "no grain" problem.

Cooking Is the Part Nobody Talks About

Taurine is water-soluble and breaks down with heat. A published UC Davis study measured it directly: baking a kidney loses about 40% of its taurine. Boiling loses 60–80%, depending on the cut. Kibble extrusion runs hotter and harder than any of that — which is exactly why almost every kibble bag on the shelf lists taurine as an added synthetic ingredient. They don't trust their own ingredients to survive their own process.

We Never Had That Problem

We feed raw — nothing here gets boiled or extruded. Real ingredients — lean muscle meat, heart, liver, kidney — have been in our recipes since day one, not something we added once the research caught up. Running the actual numbers on our current Signature recipe: it works out to roughly 52mg of taurine per 100g of food, from the ingredients alone — no synthetic top-up required.

Legumes are cheap. Lean muscle meat and organs are not (have you been to the grocery store lately?). That's exactly why so many formulas leaned on plant filler — a cost decision, not a nutrition one. It's also a real reason our food costs more than a bag of kibble.

So when the real research came out, we didn't have to reformulate, relaunch, or quietly swap an ingredient. The whole-food thinking was already there.