Pet Nutrition Consulting Susan Lauten Pet Diets Knoxville Internet

Susan doesn't know what she is doing.We hired her for a nutrition recipe for a pet with a health condition.
She said how she would do this in 2 days.

Well a couple of days later she sent something that was generic and not specific to the health condition our pet had, saying she would customize it for the health condition later.  We already had something generic and what she gave us had no value.  We had to bug her a couple of times before she sent anything else a couple weeks later.

It was very close to the first "recipe" she had given us.

It became obvious she had no idea what she was doing.

Our vet (a specialist, top vet in her area in our large city) had given us information saying the food had to be low in certain nutitional items. We had done research to find out what was being said for that illness by the latest researchers.
Susan had no clue what different diseases required nutritionally.  She had not read any of the studies of the last 10 years. She had not even heard of the top Veterinary schools that were leading the research for nutrition designed for health conditions (we were just shocked at this, we knew of those schools as they were so famous and we were not working in the animal health business).  She talked about some nutritionist she knew and how brilliant that person was and we started thinking what did Susan know if she thought a veterinarian trained in nutrition was brilliant.  

It turned out that Susan was not a veterinarian and never practiced as one (had taken the schooling but never passed the tests to qualify as one).  She was a teacher of a basic nutrition class for animals (the kind you take in high school, community college for people that says don't eat tons of junk food, eat your veggies, not at the level of knowledge we were asking).  She has a computer program that she puts % of protein, fat, and carbs and what kind of food (e.g. chicken, rice) it tells her qualities of the ingredients.  But she doesn't know what nutrition the different diseases require.

When we started questioning what she knew, we asked her how she was determining what was needed for that disease and she admitted she just copied what was on the label of a canned cat food sold for that medical condition.  However, she only used protein, carb, and fat, not the essential elements that our vet said was critical and that were available if you read studies on the illness.  And she was using 10 year old study information (e.g. her protein/carb/fat ratios were based on very old studies and not current information).  

We struggled with her for two months.  At that time she was still saying she would get us something customized for our pet's disease.  She was complaining how much time it took her to do the work (e.g. she spent 3-4 hours for the $250 she charged us, because she had do things like read what the label on a can of pet food).  She would send us a new recipe that as loaded with salt (extremely high) and when we asked what was different she just said she re-ran things through her program.  When we asked about the high salt levels she said well animals need salt in their diet (she had a 50 lb dog consuming more salt than the max an adult human should be eating).

Go to University of California, Davis.  They are one of the top Vet schools in the country.They offer online specialized formulas for your pet's disease for $25.They will even do consultations with your vet, to keep working on the nutrition, etc. to help your pet be as healthy as they can with their health condition.  They will give you good health information and not charge you a high price for junk like Susan does.