more re dogs eating grapes or onions(bad) - and carrots(good?)

In regard to Penny or other dogs eating grapes, as I posted on 25 December, Amber-Mae made a comment that I’d like to include here, because not everyone may see it in the ‘comments’ section.

She added a couple of things to her original comment, so I’ll include them in square brackets. (Thanks to Amber-Mae’s mum for allowing me to repeat what she said.)

“Actually, grapes are not THAT dangerous as we all keep saying... My hoomans went for a Nutrition talk few weeks back & this famous lady from Australia said, that you CAN feed fresh grapes BUT must peel off the skin. It's the skin that is dangerous, not the flesh. [Not Australia, but America, Amber’s mum says, and her name is Jill Cline. She's a researcher & a nutritionist from Nestle Purina.]

She also said that one dog ate one whole kilo of onion rings & did not die! We doggies can't die that easily from eating these stuff but raisins are dangerous becoz the skin is dried on it & maybe when it's dry, the bacteria on the skin is much more dangerous, I don't know why. My hoomans still avoid feeding us those two & of course chocolate too. Anyway, we don't like eating them anyway! So... hehehe! Not to worry..

“Oh, she also mentioned about carrots. She said raw carrot is not really working for your eyes unless it's cooked. She said that the minerals, vitamins or something like that will only work if it's boiled. I felt really pity for those hooman kids who have been eating raw carrots for years, hehehe."

I'm interested in the info from Amber-Mae's mum about carrots because Penny loves them and I feed them raw as a treat to chew on. I also mash them in a juicer called the Champion and then add the juice back into the pulp,because I heard that dogs can't absorb the goodness from raw vegetables and fruit unless the cell walls are broken to release the nutrients. The Champion is sold as a 'masticating' juicer, which is supposed to release more goodness from the fruit and vegetables (for humans).

At BNET research center I found an article that seems to bring together these two ideas about carrots. It says that cooking partially dissolves the cell walls of carrots and makes the nutrients more readily available (for humans, I presume), especially if the carrots are served with a meal that provides some fat. However, it also says that juicing can achieve the same effect.

It wasn't quite clear to me what the authority was behind the BNET article, but another at The Journal of Nutrition was a peer-reviewed authoritative source and it concluded that

Results from this study suggest that processing vegetables with heat treatment and pureeing may enhance provitamin A carotenoid uptake from these foods considerably...[and] approaches that address how carotenoids may be made more bioavailable from the food sources, through the processing and preparation methods used with these foods, deserve further investigation.

So... I'm going to keep checking on the grapes growing in our backyard and maybe hope the birds steal all the fruit as they usually do. And I'm going to continue 'masticating' carrots in our juicer. (Not that Penny gets carrots very often, because we humans love them too!)