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Posted by permission from Dr Laurelee Rubsch, Crestwood Veterinary Hospital, Crestwood, KY with thanks to Puppy Luv Pet Sitters of KY.
The purpose of this article is to empower you with the knowledge of what pet foods are made of, both good and bad. The cornerstone of providing quality care begins with quality nutrition, and proper nutrition is the key to maintaining good health for all patients, both human and animal. We want to teach you how to understand pet food ingredient labels. Medical conditions are often improved by improving the patient’s diet to a higher quality, more natural food. Choosing which food to feed your dogs and cats can be overwhelming. There are literally hundreds of choices and numerous brands, all claiming to be healthy for your pet, excluding the prescription diets that are developed specifically for medical conditions. Quality ingredients include the best meat products, no by-products, no fillers, and no harmful preservatives.
You cannot trust the marketing, claims, and pictures that some pet food manufacturers use to advertise their foods. You must turn the bag over and scan the ingredient list. We firmly believe that you get what you pay for in a pet food. Quality diets may cost more per bag but when broken down to cost per day, your pet will eat less and utilize more nutrients, resulting in less cost per day.
First, to understand an ingredient label, you have to understand how it is organized. The ingredients are listed in order from highest to lowest percent in the food. The first 4-5 ingredients in a pet food generally comprise over 50% of the total ingredients listed. The multiple vitamins and minerals are on average 1-2% of the diet.
Second, you have to understand the nutritional needs of your dog or cat. Dogs and cats are carnivores, meaning they need animal protein as their primary source of protein and energy. In addition to providing carbohydrates and vitamins, vegetables and grains can be protein sources but they may not be utilized by carnivores as efficiently as meats and are not the best primary sources of energy for our dogs and cats. In fact, studies show that cats do not even have carbohydrates as an essential nutrient, meaning they do not need carbohydrates in their diets to survive and stay healthy.
Grains or carbohydrate sources are much less expensive than meats and can help pet food manufacturers save money, which ultimately helps keeps the price of the food less for the consumer. Meats, on the other hand, are more costly and tend to elevate the price of the pet food, legitimately. Therefore, you want the first 2-4 ingredients on the ingredient list to be from a quality meat source. (We will discuss meat sources later.) Beware of the “dilution factor” in grain listing on the ingredient list. If the first ingredient is meat, but the next 3-4 ingredients are grains (i.e. corn, corn gluten meal, wheat gluten, rice, soy, barley, rye, millet, etc.) then there is likely a much higher ratio of grains than to meat. Basically, this means that use of multiple grains in lower percentages will artificially elevate the meat or meat by-products to a position near the top of the ingredient list. In other words, if corn is used as a single grain source, it would be the first ingredient. But, if corn, wheat, barley, and soy are all included in a food, then the meat would be listed at the beginning of the list, artificially because of the actual percentages. Ultimately, the total grain amount would outweigh the meat source causing the food to be a grain rich food, instead of a meat rich food as the label may indicate initially.
Quality of meat and grain sources in pet food are the driving factor for the price and quality of a pet food. When whole meats or whole grains are used in the manufacturing of a pet food, the food will generally cost more and be a better quality food. Pet food manufacturers are required to list the type and species of the meat such as beef, turkey meal, chicken by product, or venison digest. The highest quality meat sources are meat meal or actual meat, not meat by-product or meat digest. Meal is the meet striped from the bone and ground, which is an excellent protein source. By-products are everything scraped off the rendering floor such as carcasses, beaks, feet, hooves, intestinal tracts, necks, etc. with artificial preservatives added to make the food unacceptable for human consumption. Basically, it is everything leftover after the good meat has been removed for human consumption. You may also see the unidentified “animal fat”, “bone meal”, or “animal digest” that do not specific what they are. These and by-products are all used to increase palatability, or flavor, but decrease the nutrient value for your animal companion. They also save the manufacturer monetarily and keep the cost to the consumer down because it allows them to change what goes into the food should a less expensive animal source becomes available.
As with meats, grain based “by-products” are also available to manufacturers, which are the non-nutritional portions of the grains. For example, brewers rice is a processed rice product that is missing many of the nutrients contained in whole ground rice thus reducing the quality. Another example is tomato pumice, which are just the rinds of the peeled tomatoes which have no real nutritional value like the whole tomato. Corn gluten is the dried residue from corn that remains after most of the starch and germ of the corn have been removed. (This ingredient has been claimed to be one of the hallmarks of poor quality foods.) Wheat gluten meal, one of the ingredients that caused illness and death due to contamination in the recent Menu Foods recall, is a similar cheap source of poor quality protein used by lower-quality pet food manufacturers. Soy protein concentrate is a little better quality but still provides plant protein rather than the more desirable animal protein.
Additives play a huge role in the quality of the food that you are feeding. Additives include preservatives, types of oils, and artificial colors. Preservatives can be natural or artificial. Some natural preservatives include rosemary oil and mixed tocophorols; these are the safest for your pet. It is best to avoid BHT/BHA and ethoxyquin, which are inexpensive synthetic preservatives used extensively in pet foods and known to cause cancer. (These are also what make the meat by-products unacceptable for human consumption.) The type of oil used can improve the coat quality and flavor of the food. Vegetable oil is approximately 30% linoleic acid and sunflower oil is about 72% linoleic acid. Linoleic acid can dramatically improve coat quality and help with allergic skin conditions; hence, sunflower oil is a much healthier oil used in pet foods. Finally, artificial colors are for you, the consumer, not the pet. Artificial colors used in pet food create the impression that the green and orange kibbles are peas and carrots, which is a great marketing tactic. The reality is that the peas and carrots, for example, that you see on the bag label truly make up less than 1% of the diet. As a consumer, this should make you angry. Does this really meet the qualifications of truth in labeling? These companies are tricking you into thinking that you are feeding a nutritious diet when in fact, your dog or cat is getting on average lots of grains, with a few animal parts sprayed with synthetic chemicals for preservation and artificial dyes to make the food look appetizing.
The good news is that there are many quality pet foods on the market and more are making their way into the pet food retail stores and specialty pet stores. You simply need to read the ingredient labels carefully, keeping the “dilution factor” in mind. Look for key words like “lamb” or “chicken meal” and avoid “by-products”, if possible. Avoid the major grains like corn, corn gluten meal, wheat gluten, barley, rye, and millet, as well as soy and dairy. Although there are nutrients in these ingredients, remember that in large quantities, they do not provide the optimum nutrition for your dog or cat. If the food contains significant quantities of whole vegetables or fruits, the manufacturer is making an attempt to create a balanced diet. However, during the high temperature kibble making process, most of the vegetable nutrients are lost. It is better to opt for a food void of grains and by-products, first and foremost, and add fresh vegetables and fruits like pumpkin puree, green beans, carrots, apples, and blueberries. (Avoid grapes, raisins, and onions as these can be toxic.)
Our goal is to inform you and empower you to make sense of the pet food details. We challenge you to be proactive by contacting pet food manufacturers for more information or by sharing this information with other pet lovers. The bottom line is that the choice you make in a pet food can directly affect the quality of health and longevity of your beloved family pet. We would love to discuss any other questions you may have about your pet’s nutritional needs. There is no perfect food, but there may be a perfect food to meet your individual pet’s nutritional needs.