Dog Nutrition

Beet pulp - it’s good for the gut.

Sugar beets (Beta vulgaris var. altissima) are grown around the globe and are a valuable option in modern crop rotation strategies. Last year, US farmers harvested 29.9 million tons of sugar beets on 1.3 million acres. Over the past 10 years, sugar beets accounted for more than 53% of US sugar production.

Sugar beets are tubers that grow in the ground much like garden beets, carrots or turnips. In autumn, farmers “campaign” or harvest the sugar beets by unearthing the tubers and trucking them to processing plants, where they are dumped in mountainous piles waiting their turn to be processed. First, dirt and debris are sifted and washed from the surface and the sugar beets are sliced into cossettes (chips). These cossettes are then steeped and (or) washed with hot water in countercurrent flow diffusers to extract the sugar. The extracted juice is further processed to produce granulated sugar suitable for the sweetener market and the residue (pulp) is dried. For ease of transportation and handling, most of the fibrous beet pulp is milled into 3/8-inch diameter pellets.

The gray, speckled pellets are sold primarily into the livestock feed market and have found favor in dairy cattle and horse diets as “dried plain beet pulp” (Section 60.36; AAFCO 2005 Official Publication). Some beet fiber has begun to find its way into human foods with such disparate applications as decorative sprinkles on baked goods to supplemental fiber laxatives. This latter application is where beet pulp has found favor in pet foods, as a supplemental fiber source to promote bowel regularity, stool consistency and overall gastrointestinal (GI) health.

Physiological effects

Beet pulp has found favor as a key ingredient in hairball remedies. Regularity or laxation from fibers is attributed, among other things, to “bulking” and water-binding capacity in the lower GI. These combine to increase GI luminal contents and stimulate gut motility. One would predict that beet pulp, with its high concentration of total dietary fiber (TDF >65%) and substantial water-holding capacity (>6 g H2O/g DM), would fulfill this role quite nicely. This was confirmed in early dog nutrition work in which a linear increase in wet fecal excretion and defecations per day resulted from increasing levels of beet pulp in the diet (Fahey, et al., 1990). A similar effect was demonstrated in the cat (Sunvold, et al., 1995b). Contrary to what often occurs with supplemental fiber sources, elevated levels of beet pulp (12.5% and 7.5% in the dog and cat, respectively) were not reported to negatively affect pet food palatability.

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