Dog Food Ingredient Summary
What we want to see from the ingredient label:
1. First few ingredients are meat products.
- If they are chicken, turkey or any kind of meat, are inclusive of water content and once this is removed - as it must be to make a dry food - these ingredients will end up weighing around 20% of the original weight.
- If they are chicken MEAL, turkey MEAL or any kind of meat MEAL even better because AAFCO definition for “chicken meal”:
The dry rendered product from a combination of clean flesh and skin with or without accompanying bone, derived from the parts of whole carcasses of chicken, exclusive of feathers, heads, feet, or entrails. The word MEAL means the meat is added in the dehydrated meal form.
2. Good range of fruits/vegetables in the food, whole eggs and a good range of probiotics are encourage.
3. Potatoes are good as carbohydrate source, which are also a good source of B vitamins and other minerals.
4. If grain are included, we prefer oatmeal, brown rice or barley because these are whole grains that are low-allergenic and a good quality source of carbohydrates and additional protein.
5. Flaxseed is a good quality source of Omega 6 and Omega 3.
6. Sunflower oil is a good quality source of linoleic acid.
What we DO NOT want to see from the ingredient label:
1. Chicken fat or any kind of fat/oil as the first few ingredient. Research at Purdue University has identified a fat in the top four ingredients of a dry dog food as a factor that increases the risk of bloat in large breed dogs. Smaller breeds are untested. (However, if big percentage of meat cover as the major ingredient, this shouldn’t be a problem)
2. Corn or wheat as the ingredient. Corn and wheat are difficult for dogs to digest and thought to be the cause of a great many allergy and yeast infection problems.
3. Fish meal preserved with Ethoxyquin. Ethoxyquin is a chemical preservative banned or heavily regulated in use in human food because it is believed to be carcinogenic. We cannot recommend the use of any product using ingredients preserved with this chemical.
4. Beet pulp is filler and a controversial ingredient – it is a by-product, being dried residue from sugar beets which has been cleaned and extracted in the process of manufacturing sugar.
5. Poultry fat, animal fat are low quality ingredient of unidentified origin for which it is impossible to determine source or quality.
6. Any kind of by-products. By-products are usually products that are of such low quality as to be rejected for use in the human food chain, or else are those parts that have so little value that they cannot be used elsewhere in either the human or pet food industries.
7. Soybean meal is a poor quality source of protein in dog food, and a common cause of allergy problems. Some believe that it is the number 1 cause of food allergies in dogs (outstripping even wheat).
6. Egg “deriviatives”, brewers rice are waste products.
This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 3:09 pm and is filed under My Golden and My Shih Tzu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
