Read and Understand Commercial Dog Food Labels To Identify Better Quality

Many excellent dog foods are available from commercial sources. They provide excellent nutrition from superior food sources. By contrast, some commercial dog foods may not provide the best nutrition for your dog and may not contain the highest quality ingredients. How can you tell the difference? Two small sections of the label will tell you what you need to know: the nutritional analysis and the ingredient list. Everything else on the label, with the name and the FDA-required contact information, is pretty much just there for advertising purposes.

The nutritional analysis, or guaranteed analysis, is usually broken down into four parts: protein, fat, fiber, and moisture. Some labels may differ by adding various vitamins and minerals to the nutritional analysis, particularly in foods formulated for specific purposes such as growth or pregnancy formulas. Two of the nutrients, protein and fiber, are listed as a minimum percentage. Dog food manufacturers are required to report the other two, fat and moisture, as maximum percentage in the content.

It is easy to misunderstand these percentages if comparing dry food to canned food, given that it appears that the dry food appears to contain more protein for the money. This apparent difference is misleading. By comparing the percentage of protein that is contained in both foods by dry weight it becomes apparent that the figures are usually comparable.

One good approximation of the actual dry content of protein contained in canned food is to multiply the percentage of guaranteed protein by four. Since dry food contains about four times the "dry matter" of canned food, this calculation will give you an estimate of how much protein by dry weight exists in your selection.

It is possible to estimate the quality of a food by the amount of meat in the first part of the ingredient list. All of the food ingredients that appear in significant, measurable amounts are listed in descending quantity on the ingredient panel. Similar ingredients, such as chicken and chicken meal, may be listed separately because they are not identical.

This multiple listing leads to the need to account for the presence of the item several times on the label. Therefore, foods that list corn product before they list the meat products on the label are not as good as food that list meat first.

It is important not to be fooled by ingredient lists that name a single meat product first, following it with two or three different corn ingredients. Finally, consumers should not be unduly disturbed by chemical names that appear at the end of the nutritional analysis. These names often belong to vitamins that appear in the food, which may be required to appear under their chemical name.

Next article: Read And Understand Commercial Dog Food Ingredients Label