Dog Food Ingredients: Labeling “Tricks”
Labels on pet food look rather simple. They guarantee Protein, Fat, Fiber and some vitamins and minerals, but do you know what it all means?
The dog food protein guarantee refers to the total amount of protein in the formula, both the meat and grain portions. You need to understand where your protein is really coming from to make a good choice. In order to do this you need to look closely at the ingredients and the order they come in.
One of the most misleading, but perfectly legal, label “tricks” is to separate the grain portion into multiple products. For example, you may see a dog food label that has corn and corn gluten on the list. Well, guess what? It’s all still corn! Even if the first ingredient is a meat, the second is corn, the third could be animal by-product and the fourth corn gluten meal, a large portion of the formula is corn. It could be as much as 40-45%. You would have to know the actual percentages to know for sure, but it would be best to not buy a food with more than one version of a single grain.
You also need to remember that a formula with “meat” instead of “meat meal” and several grain ingredients will have less meat protein than it appears because of the water content of whole meat.
If the dog food label lists several different grains along with a meat, you may end up with a heavy grain formula also. Again you would need to know the actual percentages to be sure, but it would be a safe bet that its not as good as it appears.
For example, SportMix has a high protein formula that has meat meal as the first ingredient, which looks good. It then has ground yellow corn as the second ingredient, soybean meal as the third and ground wheat as the fourth. Even though meat meal is the first ingredient, there are three grains following it! Since soybean meal is very high in protein, there would not need to be a lot of meat meal to make a high protein food. Once again, I am not privy to the exact percentages of each product in the food, but in my experience, I would be leery of trusting this product as the best choice of food for my dogs.
Pro Pac, on the other hand, has a high protein formula that has chicken meal as the first ingredient, ground yellow corn as the second, chicken fat as the third and beet pulp as the fourth. The only other “grain” is flaxseed, which is a good source of omega fatty acids and very acceptable. These are the only primary ingredients, so you know that this is definitely high in meat protein and is a much better choice. If they would replace the corn with rice it would be even better, as corn is often an allergen in dogs.
The moral to this is to really study the dog food labels and determine an assumed actual value. If a product has four main ingredients, the averages per ingredient would be about 22% each as the vitamins, minerals and asundries will account for a small portion. Using that, a food with one meat and three grains is going to be heavy on grain, especially if the meat portion is “meat” and not “meat meal”. The first ingredient has to be at a higher percentage than the second, the second higher than the third and so on. But even if the meat were 50% and the three grains total 45%, that is still a very high grain formula. A dog is a carnivore by nature and needs meat, not grain.