Stearic Acid

Someone asked me about Stearic Acid, often used in animal vitamins and supplements, so in case anyone else has the same question, here is what I’ve found on Stearic Acid.

There is one little-known pet food company spouting warnings against the use of Stearic Acid in pet foods. They cite a 1990 University study.

Check your refrigerator and your cupboard. You will see it in margarines, shortenings, spreads, chocolate, chocolate chips, vanilla flavoring, chewing gum… If you want to avoid it, you are going to have to throw a lot of human stuff out.

According to Wikipedia, Stearic Acid is one of the useful saturated fatty acids that comes from many animal and vegetable fats and oils. It is a waxy solid, and its chemical formula is CH₃(CH₂)₁₆COOH. Its name comes from the Greek word stéar (genitive: stéatos), which means tallow. The term stearate is applied to the salts and esters of stearic acid.

Stearic acid is prepared by treating animal fat with water at a high pressure and temperature, leading to the hydrolysis of triglycerides. It can also be obtained from the hydrogenation of some unsaturated vegetable oils. Common stearic acid is actually a mix of stearic acid and palmitic acid, although purified stearic acid is available separately.

In other words, it’s a natural product.Check the American Heart Association web page on it. No warnings there.
http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4747

So let me tell you my rule of thumb when researching ingredients.

Pretend you are a health product manufacturer. It’s a common marketing technique to take an ingredient that YOUR product doesn’t contain, for whatever are your personal or professional or scientific reasons are, and make a huge deal out of the competition using it.

Take, for example, holistic pet food companies. Woo, don’t ever use by-products! That’s the marketing campaign. And yet, holistic pet foods are in the less than 1% who say that, even the high-end prescription diets like SD and Royal Canin say they are fine.

Some make a huge deal out of no corn, others say that corn is a perfectly acceptable protein. As you know, I am anti-corn in pet foods so that appealed to me.

Take parabens in cosmetics. I am anti-paraben, and yet check your soaps and shampoos and lotions. 99% have methyl, butyl, or propyl parabens in them.

By law, no company can use an ingredient that’s not on an approved list. Not in pet food, not in vitamins. What makes each company different is how they mix it all together.

I would not be so interested in what this one pet food company citing a 1990 study has to say as what PubMed has to say about stearic acid, or some of the other resources who have nothing to gain or lose by expressing an opionion because they don’t market anything.