Top Three Dog Food Ingredients to Avoid

Choosing a dog food is serious business! A proper doggie diet helps maintain a healthy coat, supports digestion, and increases immunity in your dog. Many dog owners want to buy the best quality dog food, but they know better than to rely on marketing alone. With all the choices out there, it’s best to focus on what shouldn’t be in your dog’s food. Avoid these dog food ingredients and you’ll be on the right track.

Meat Meals

Fish meal, chicken meal, beef meal all sound like tasty ingredients at first glance. However, the word “meal” indicates that any part of the animal could be used: Bones, organs, feet, or even skin. Meat meals are generally not as digestible as muscle meat and have a poor balance of amino acids. Fish meal is especially problematic, because US Coast Guard regulations state that fish not fit for human consumption must be preserved with ethoxyquin. So, unless the dog food’s ingredientsspecifically lists “human grade” fish or fish meal, it is likely that the food contains ethoxyquin.

Corn

Corn is cheap for dog food manufacturers, so they use a lot of it, in all forms. Most of the corn products in dog food are so processed that they are devoid of nutritional value. Examples include the use of corn germ meal and corn gluten meal as a protein source, corn syrup for sweeteners, and corn cellulose for fiber. According to The Dog Food Project, all of these ingredients contain no nutritional value and are used to bulk up cheap dog foods, making them more palatable to dogs.

Protein from corn is a poor substitute for animal-based proteins. A chart on Dog Food Advisor shows that corn has a biological value of only 54. To compare, eggs have a value of 100, and even wheat shows up at 60. Just because a dog food contains a certain percentage of protein doesn’t mean that it’s good-quality, digestible protein. If you want a quality dog food, the first ingredients should always be whole, animal-based proteins, not corn!

Unpronounceable Preservatives

Our own vet told us to follow the same rule for dog food that we follow for our own food; if you can’t pronounce it, you probably shouldn’t eat it. Glyceryl monostearate, ethoxyquin, butylated hydroxytoululene (BHT). Huh? Most of these chemicals are added to poor-quality dog food as binders or preservatives, to keep the kibble chunks together and keep fats from going bad. These ingredients range from harmless-but-useless to known carcinogens. In most cases, there are natural ingredients that do the same thing, but they are more expensive to use. This is why holistic dog food costs more for consumers.

Sources
http://www.petmd.com/dog/nutrition/evr_dg_the_benefits_of_proper_nutrition

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