And without further ado, LOL!
But seriously, what I was going to say, is that I did a lot of reading up on "meat and bone meal" (one of Purina's and other inexpensive commercial dog food's main ingredients) as a dog food ingredient. If you do a regular google search, you will find that most people have nothing good to say about it. You *could* chalk that up to the people writing about it being the ignorant masses acting on mob mentality. So I decided to check out the scholarly vet nutrition literature, and almost all articles (including Dr. Remillard's) say that it is a good source of high quality protein, and is not a bad ingredient to have in dog food. HOWEVER, the two most recent and frequently cited articles made their own "meat and bone meal" in house for their feeding experiments. They did not use commercial preparations.
My thoughts and conclusions are this: If you are going to make your own "meat and bone meal" or "poultry byproduct meal" and use known ingredients, then knock yourself out. It's probably healthy! BUT, the commercial grade "meat and bone meal" allows the use of dead and diseased animals, road kill, euthanized pets, and the fecal matter that may be present in the intestines. The cooking process will undoubtedly sterilize it, so your dog won't be ingesting dangerous bacteria (unless the food processor has additional health code violations), and the protein and nutritional content will *probably* be fine. But, I see the following problems:
(1) Antibiotics and other drugs might not be destroyed in the cooking process, and can contaminate food lots.
(2) If the meat is of unknown origin, it will be impossible to eliminate protein sources that your dog might be allergic to, should your dog be one of the rare few who has food allergies.
(3) Mad cow disease. That disease is now under control, but the indiscriminate use of "meat and bone meal" in animal feeds is what allowed it to spread. The infectious agent (a prion) was not killed in the cooking process. While mad cow disease may not be a problem any more, use of dead animals of unknown provenance *could* allow the re-emergence and spread of similar types of diseases.
Now, Dr. Remillard (and other trained vet nutritionists) say that "meat and bone meal" is a quality ingredient, and the DFA thinks that it is poison incarnate. I am closer to the DFA's point of view on this one issue. It would make me very nervous feeding my dog food that has unregulated and unknown ingredients. I WILL try to contact Dr. Remillard by email and see if I've mischaracterized her position on this. If I hear back, I'll let you know and give a clarification.
So, in summary, I take the good and the bad from all sources and form my own opinion, and that's all I'm asking people to do. As far as Purina and Blue Buffalo go, I feed my cat Purina One (which contains named ingredients as its main ingredients) and I feel Bella Blue Buffalo (which also contains named ingredients as its main ingredients).