Understanding the ingredients in dog and cat food

Let's examine the first few ingredients or a common dog food:

Chicken, Corn Meal, Ground Whole Grain Sorghum, Chicken By-Product Meal

Those ingredients are listed in order of weight before they are cooked. Can you imagine what you have to do to a piece of chicken to make it turn into a crunchy little nugget? You have to cook it - a lot. You have to cook all the moisture out of it for sure; and a piece of chicken meat is about 80% water to begin with. That means 10 lbs of raw chicken is cooked down to only about 2 lbs. When you see the word "meal" after an ingredient, that means the moisture content has been removed before the ingredient was added to the dog food recipe. What does all this mean? It means that there is more corn in this food than chicken! In fact, in all likelyhood, there is more whole grain sorghum and more chicken by product meal than there is actual chicken.

Now we're not trying to say that that food is bad for your dog, but we do want you to know what you are getting. Your dog will probably be just fine on a food like that, but if you really want your best bud to be healthy, energetic, and have a beautiful coat and good breath; well, you may want to consider a few different options.

There are a lot of things to look for when evaluating an ingredients list, but for now we're going to be brief. Look for named meats and named meat meals. The ingredient "Beef Meal" is good (you know you are getting beef), "Meat Meal" is not as good (because it could indicate any type of meat - think cafeteria style mystery meat). Also, look for foods with limited amounts of grain, or no grains at all. Grains are things like corn, wheat, soy, rice, barley, sorghum, etc. Corn, wheat, and soy are the three grains that cause the most problems with dogs (like excessives shedding, itching, bad breath, and too much stool). More wholesome grains like rice and barley are better for your dog, but still shouldn't make up the bulk of what you are feeding him. The final thing to watch out for in a dog food is ingredient splitting. Ingredient splitting means different parts of an ingredient are listed as separate ingredients. Here's an example of splitting: "Chicken meal, rice, rice hulls, rice protein." When you add up all the rice related ingredients, you get more rice than chicken meal!