The science
We solved the thing that's making pets sick.
Not in a lab. Not with a marketing claim. By reading the label
— and noticing that almost half of it isn't there.
60%
of dogs get cancer.
(Morris Animal Foundation Golden Retriever Lifetime Study)
Chapter 1
Dogs are getting sick at rates we'd never accept in humans.
In the largest published mortality study of North American dogs, cancer was the single leading disease-cause of death in adult dogs — accounting for roughly one in four deaths overall, and the majority of deaths in dogs over the age of ten.
The Morris Animal Foundation's Golden Retriever Lifetime Study — a 3,000-dog longitudinal trial running for over a decade — has found cancer to be even more common in some breeds, with golden retriever cancer rates pushing past 60% in lifetime cause-of-death analyses.
If a quarter of human adults were dying of cancer, we'd be looking for something in the environment. With dogs, the field stopped looking — because the answer is too obvious to be profitable.
Chapter 2
Your pet drinks your water. Breathes your air. Eats nothing like you.
A pet living with you shares almost every environmental input. Same tap. Same indoor air. Same yard, same dust, same pollen. The shared exposures cancel out — they aren't the variable.
What's left is the bowl. You eat real, varied, mostly-fresh food prepared at home. Your pet eats an industrial extruded pellet — heat-blasted past 300°F, shelf-stabilized for two years, then sold by the pound. Same house, very different metabolic inputs.
When you're hunting for a cause and you've already eliminated water and air, you don't need an MRI to know where to look next.
Chapter 3
The word "crude" is cruel.
Federal AAFCO rules require pet food labels to disclose a "guaranteed analysis": crude protein, crude fat, crude fiber, moisture, and ash. The word crude just means "measured by a generic lab assay" — it doesn't mean quality, source, or digestibility. That's intentional.
Walk to the kitchen and look at your pet food bag. Add the four numbers up. On a typical dry kibble bag you'll see something like 26% protein, 14% fat, 4% fiber, 10% moisture, 7% ash. That's 61% of the bag.
Where's the other 39%? More importantly, why is it hidden?
It's called nitrogen-free extract — a polite term for starches, sugars, and refined carbohydrates. AAFCO doesn't require it to be listed. So it isn't. In most popular dry kibbles, this hidden line item runs 40 to 50 percent of the bag — the largest single category by weight, completely absent from the label.
Do the math yourself
100% − (crude protein + crude fat + crude fiber + moisture + ash) = hidden carbohydrate load.
Try it on the bag in your pantry. The number you get is what isn't on the bag.
Dogs are carnivores who evolved on near-zero dietary carbohydrate. A diet that's half refined sugar is the problem.
Chapter 4
A pet's metabolism wasn't built to run on sugar, yet 40% of their food is carbs.
Dogs aren't small humans. They're carnivores — their pancreas produces only a fraction of the amylase (the starch-digesting enzyme) humans make, and their saliva produces essentially none. Their entire metabolic architecture was tuned, over tens of thousands of years, to run on animal fats and proteins. Not bread.
Feed a body that wasn't built for glucose a steady stream of glucose, and what you get is exactly what you'd predict: chronic blood-sugar elevation, chronic insulin response, and the chronic low-grade systemic inflammation that comes with both. Twenty four hours a day. Every day. For their entire lives.
And here's where the cancer math gets uncomfortable. Buckle up.
Cancer cells use sugar (glucose) for energy — a phenomenon called the Warburg effect, observed and published in human oncology since the 1920s. Whatever cancer cells exist in a pet's body, they grow fastest when there's plenty of glucose around to feed them. A carbohydrate-heavy diet doesn't cause cancer the way a carcinogen does — but it gives every nascent tumor cell its preferred fuel, on a constant drip, for a lifetime.
So why is it in the bag?
Money. And not honest money.
Corn costs about 10¢ a pound. Chicken costs $2. To sell kibble for $1–2 a pound and still make a profit, brands have to make starch the main ingredient and meat the topping.
Starch does one more thing meat can't: it holds the pellet together. Take it out and you can't even make kibble that survives on a shelf. The price and the factory both demand the carbs. Your pet's biology is the one thing nobody is designing around.
Here's the part nobody talks about: corn and soy aren't really cheap. We just pay for them twice.
Corn and soy are the two most subsidized crops in America. Through farm bills, crop insurance, and ethanol mandates, taxpayers send tens of billions of dollars a year to keep both crops cheap. Without the subsidy, neither would be.
That cheap corn turns into cheap kibble filler. That cheap soy turns into cheap protein powder. Both end up in your pet's bowl — paid for, in part, by your taxes.
Take the subsidy away and the whole kibble pricing model falls apart. Carbs aren't in your pet's food because they belong there. They're there because someone else is paying to keep them cheap. We are paying for our own poison.
Chapter 5
Bestfriend is formulated to empower the pet's metabolism — not work against it.
Our recipe is mostly hemp seed meal, animal organs, and the key micronutrients that every pet metabolism is built around — tuned for high protein, healthy fats, and the full essential vitamin and mineral panel.
A metabolism that gets the right inputs is a metabolism that can do its job. That's the whole bet.
Hemp seed meal — the base
A complete plant protein (~30% of our entire formula) with an omega-3 ratio pets actually need, plus magnesium, zinc, iron, and gut-friendly fiber. No pesticides and no allergens. It's that simple.
Animal organs — nature's multivitamin
Liver, heart, and kidney. Liver delivers vitamin A, B12, and copper at densities no synthetic premix matches. Heart brings CoQ10 and taurine. Kidney rounds out selenium and B vitamins. Essential for dogs.
High protein, high fat, near-zero starch
We build to a carnivore macronutrient profile — protein and fat dominate the calorie split, refined carbs don't appear at all. No corn, no wheat, no soy/pea-protein filler standing in for real animal nutrition.
Every essential micronutrient, fully dosed
Calcium, phosphorus, taurine, choline, vitamin D, vitamin E, iodine, zinc — every nutrient on the AAFCO essential list, dialed to the published species-specific requirement and printed in the analysis on every batch.
Food that fights back.
Big food did you dirty. Read your current bag. Add the numbers. Then try ours — and watch what happens when your pet's metabolism gets the inputs it was built for.
Bestfriend was built on first principles nutrition for dogs. It is not a medication, treatment, or cure for any disease. Always consult your veterinarian for diagnosed conditions.