13 Things Every Dog Owner Should Know About Dog Food
1. Corn, wheat and soy products are bad. They are considered cheap ways of binding the dog food kibble together. It offers pretty much no nutritional value, meaning your dog just poops it out.
2. Chicken By-products (or any by-product for that matter) are yucky too. AAFCO (the people who regulate dog food) defines by products as: “Consists of the dry, ground, rendered, clean parts of the carcass of slaughtered chicken, such as necks, feet, undeveloped eggs, and intestines — exclusive of feathers except in such amounts as might occur unavoidably in good processing practices.” This could range for anything from the liver or the eye, but you won’t know specifically what part. Used as a source of protein, but there are better ways to find it.
3. Corn gluten meal was the reason the dog food was recalled, and is still being used.
4. Animal Fat isn’t regulated at all, it can be fat from dead, diseased, disabled, or dying prior to slaughter goats, pigs, cows, even euthanized shelter animals or roadkill.
5. Animal Digest is defined by AAFCO as: “A material which results from chemical and/or enzymatic hydrolysis of clean and undecomposed animal tissue. The animal tissues used shall be exclusive of hair, horns, teeth, hooves and feathers, except in such trace amounts as might occur unavoidably in good factory practice and shall be suitable for animal feed. If it bears a name descriptive of its kind or flavor(s), it must correspond thereto.” There is also no regulation on the quality of animal, so that animal could very easily be dead, diseased, disabled, or dying euthanized shelter animals or roadkill. Dogs usually like the taste of Animal Digest, usually making the dog prefer that dog food over dog food without this ingredient.
6. Iams, Eukanuba, Science Diet, Nutro/NutroMax and grocery store brands all use these ingredients. There are much better foods out there, for cheaper!
7. Meat meals, such as chicken meal, is good! Meal is considered a dehydrated meat, meaning there is no water weight included in that meat.
8. The main ingredients in the food are all ingredients leading up to (and including) the source of fat.
9. Your first few in ingredients should be a meal or meat, a grain like oatmeal or barley, vegetables, vitamins like riboflavin or vitamin b-12, then a fat.
10. If the name of the food includes the phrase (with “ingredient”), the named ingredient must not be less than 3% of the total weight. This includes Glucosamine and Chrondroiton.
11. If the name of the food includes “flavor” or “with flavor”, there is no specific percentage required, as long as that ingredient is somewhat dectectable. You’ll see this most commonly in canned dog food.
12. Sweeteners (like cane molasses, corn syrup, sugar, fructose, glucose, etc) shouldn’t be in any dog food. They are generally only added to poor quality foods to make them more attractive, since otherwise dogs would simply refuse to eat them. Many dogs get addicted to sweeteners, which can cause or aggravate health problems, including ear infections and diabetes. This addiction frequently poses a problem when owners are trying to convince their pets to eat a better quality food that does not contain any sweeteners, so frustrated owners continue feeding unhealthy brands. Sadly, Beneful, Alpo, and Purina products have sugar in their dog foods.
13. Dogs need a certain amount of fats and oils in their diet, mostly for skin and coat health, but also for proper brain development and other critical processes in the body - and in this regard some are more valuable than others. As food ingredients they should be specifically named and of high nutritional value. Beef tallow and lard make foods highly attractive to dogs and are not harmful, but they are high in saturated fat and low in valuable fatty acids.
(credits to the dog food project)
