You and your new pup stand in the aisle, trying to make sense of all the many hundreds of bags of dog food. It is an overwhelming consideration as the wrong choice can gravely affect your dog’s health – not something you want to consider. So how do you decide? You do the same thing you do in the grocery store – you ask for help understanding the dog food labels.

 

Understanding Dog Food Labels

 

The most deceptive part of understanding dog food labels is the moisture content listed under the guaranteed analysis. Even kibble contains moisture or water although the amount is usually limited to under 8%. Wet or canned food can contain up to 80% water, which if you take away the water means you have only 20% left over of actual food. This makes wet food a nutritional mixed bag – that 20% may be less processed then kibble but the actual nutrients in each can is limited by quantity.

 

To find out the actual breakdown of protein, fat, and fiber in a bag or tin of dog food requires you to first remove the water from the equation. Say a bag of dog food contains 10% moisture and states that it also contains 25% protein. If you remove the moisture, that leaves 90% of the weight remaining. To find out the amount of protein, divide 25% by the remaining 90% and you now have a food that actually contains 30.6% protein.

 

Try the same equation with a can of food that contains 80% moisture and 5% protein. The amount of protein is actually 25% if it did not contain the moisture.

 

If you decide you want to feed your dog wet food, always do the math on the protein and fat levels to make sure that your dog’s nutritional requirements are being met.

 

Understanding Dog Food Label Ingredients

 

Like human foods, ingredients must be listed in order of weight i.e. the heavier the weight of an ingredient, the higher on the list it appears. By where high value ingredients are listed, you can quickly tell the quality of a food. For example, food listing chicken or meat first is probably a high quality food. However, if ground corn is listed first, you know that a good portion of the kibble is fillers. Manufacturers also get around this rule by breaking down the filler ingredients into small groups – ground corn, corn gluten, and corn bran are all corn but by breaking them into three separate ingredients, their placement in the list is farther down from where it would be if they just stated ‘corn’. This is not the same for meat and meat by-products however as these are always classed as two separate types of ingredients – if meat or chicken is listed first, it is indeed the main ingredient in a food.

  

By checking the amount of protein, fat, and fiber within a food by the quality of the ingredients, you should be able to quickly figure out what your dog requires.

 

Common Food Listed as Ingredients on Dog Food Labels

 

Meat: This describes the clean flesh of the animal and listed as chicken, beef, lamb, turkey, etc same as in human food. Meat includes the skeletal muscle or what humans consider meat as well as tongue, heart, esophagus, diaphragm, tongue, fat and skin, sinew, nerves and blood vessels normally found within that meat.

 

Meat By-Products: This is the area with the most amount of grey area. Meat by-products include the rest of the clean parts of the animal minus the meat. Included in this list are lungs, spleen, brain, kidneys, liver, bone, blood, stomach and cleaned intestines. It does NOT include hair, teeth, horns, or hooves!

 

Poultry By-Products: This includes the clean parts of the slaughtered bird including the heads, feet, and internal organs. This does NOT include feathers.

 

Fish Meal: This is the clean ground tissue of undecomposed fish or fish cuttings. Oil may or may not be present.

 

Beef Tallow: This is the fat derived from beef.

 

Ground Corn: Like it sounds, this is the entire kernel of corn that has been ground.

 

Corn Gluten Meal: This is a by-product of the manufacture of corn syrup and starch. It is the dried residue after the removal of the bran, germ, and starch.

 

Brewer’s Rice: Small fragments of rice kernels that have been separated from the larger kernels of milled rice.

 

Brown Rice: This is the unpolished rice left over after the kernels have been removed.

 

Soybean Meal: This is the by-product of the production of soybean oil.

 

Ethoxyquin: This is a chemical preservative that prevents spoilage in dog food.

 

BHA: Butylated hydroxyanisole is a fat preservative.

 

Tocopherols: Otherwise known as vitamin E are naturally occurring compounds that are included as a natural preservative.

 

Guaranteeing your Dog’s Health by Reading and Understanding Dog Food Labels

 

A little bit of knowledge mixed with some basic math will help guarantee that what your dog is eating is meeting or exceeding his nutritional needs. This is vitally important to your dog’s health and overall well being. Do not get swept up in the price of the food as what you will save on the cost of feeding your pup will be negated by the constant veterinary bills resulting from eating ‘doggy junk food’ every day.