With the New Year now into full swing, resolutions are being sought.  Many of us resolve to lose weight, eat healthier, save money, etc. Why not make a resolution to ensure your pet's good health this year?  Really make a conscious effort to choose only healthy options for your pet. The best place to start? Reading your pet's food's label!  Do you know what all those ingredients are?  Do you know what secrets the label can tell you? Lets's examine a label from a popular dog food.

Ingredients: corn, soybean meal, beef and bone meal, ground wheat flour, animal fat (bha used as preservative), corn syrup, wheat middlings, water sufficeint for processing, animal digest (source of chicken flavor), propylene glycol, salt, hydrochloric acid, potassium chloride, caramel color, sorbic acid (used as a preservative), sodium carbonate, minerals (ferrous sulfate, zinc oxide, manganous oxide, copper sulfate, calcium iodate, sodium selenite), choline chloride, vitamins (vitamin E supplement, vitamin A supplement, niacin supplement, D-calcium pantothenate, riboflavin supplement, pyridoxine hydrochloride, thiamine mononitrate, vitamin D3 supplement, folic acid, biotin, vitamin B12 supplement), calcium sulfate, titanium dioxide, yellow 5, yellow 6, red 40, BHA (used as preservative), dl methionine.

 How the ingredients are listed - 

The ingredients are listed by precentage in the formula.  Here we see that corn is the major componenet of this food. Why?  Because it is a cheap filler.  Soybean meal, beef and bone meal, and ground wheat flour are the next highest ingredients and so forth.  You want to find a food that the number one ingredient is a protien (beef, fish, lamb, etc).  I mean the WHOLE protien too, not just "meal" or "by-product".

What is "meal"? - 

"Meal" is what is left over after the processing of an ingredient.  For example, fish meal is the ground tissue of undecomposed whole fish or fish cuttings. Corn meal is the by-product after the manufacture of corn syrup or starch, and is the dried residue after the removal of the bran, germ and starch.  I think you can get the picture here.  So it doesn't seem that there is much nutritional value to this ingredient, right?  Well, in some cases there is a small amount of value but not enough to constitute pet food companies using it as a main ingredient in their formulas.

The infamous "by-product" - 

Meat by-products are clean parts of slaughtered animals, not including meat. These include lungs, spleen, kidneys, brain liver, blood, bone, and stomach and intestines freed of their contents. It does not include hair, horns, teeth, or hooves.  Poultry by-products are clean parts of slaughtered poultry such as heads, feet, and internal organs.  It does not contain feathers.  Although this seems like a way for pets to get the trace nutrients that normally are not found in the muscle meats of an animal, the food is normally so processed that any nutritional value to this ingredient is lost.

Corn syrup? Colorings? - 

Although black strap molassues has its benefits, corn syrup does nothing more than give flavor.  If a pet food needs to add "flavor" to help the pet eat it, something is wrong.  The other ingredient that is completely useless is any colorings.  Why? Why does a pet food need coloring? Think about it!

Wheat Middlings -

Here is a fun ingredient!  According to Wikipedia - "Wheat middlings or wheat mill run, stated by AAFCO, is coarse and fine particles of wheat bran and fine particles of wheat shorts, wheat germ, wheat flou and offal from the "tail of the mill". Wheat middling is an inexpensive by-product intermediate of human food processing, commonly referred to as floor sweepings. It is an inexpensive filler in pet foods."....Really?!

Animal digest -

Oh how I hate to even put this definition here but...

"Animal digest is a common ingredient used in pet foods. As defined by AAFCO, 'Material which results from chemical and/or enzymatic hydrolisis of clean and undecomposed animal tissue. The animal tissues used shall be exclusive of hair, horns, teeth, hooves and feathers, except in such trace amounts as might occur unavoidably in food factory practice and shall be suitable for animal feed.'

A cooked-down broth made from specified, or worse, unspeified parts of specified or unspecified animals (depending on the type of digest used). If the source is unspecified (e.g. "Animal" or "Poultry"), the animal used can be obtained from any source, so there is no control of quality or contamination. Any kind of animal can be included: "4-D animals (dead, diseased, disabled, or dying prior to slaughter), goats, pigs, horses, rats, misc. roadkill, animals euthanized at shelters, restaurant and supermarket reduse and so on.

FDA: Digests, which are materials treated with heat, enzymes and/or acids to form concentrated natural flavors. Only a small amount of a "chicken digest" is needed to produce a "Chicken Flavored Cat Food," even though no actual chicken is added to the food. - (FDA)"

I'm not going to say any more about this...

Vitamin supplements - 

Many pet foods load on the vitamin supplements. Want to know why? Because during the processing of the food, high heat and pressure are used, ingredients are over processed and thus they lose all their nutritional value!  Pet food companies then need to add vitamins to the diet.  That's good that they add them back though, right? WRONG!  They use synthesized vitamins.  If you haven't read anything about whole food vitamins (like those found in Casey Pets Essential Supplement) vs. synthesized ones, now would be a good time to do that. Here is a great article...click here.

Lastly...AAFCO - 

This is a name synonymous with pet foods but what is it?  AAFCO stands for the Association of American Feed Control Officials. The AAFCO develops guidelines for the production, labeling, and sale of animal foods.  These are called the AAFCO standards.  AAFCO has developed two standards which pet foods should meet. Pet foods which meet the AAFCO's requirements will include one of two statements on their label.

The first standard states 'formulated to meet AAFCO's nutrient requirement.' This means the food was tested in the laboratory and was found to have the recommended amount of protein, fat, etc.  But what is not mentioned is that the combination of shoe leather, used motor oil and coal would meet this standard!

The second standard states something like 'animal-feeding tests using AAFCO's procedures substantiate that this product provides complete and balanced nutrition.' For a pet food to be able to carry this label, it had to be tested on a population of animals for six months and shown to provide adequate nutrition.  But even with this statement, there are problems with its interpretation. If one particular product in a manufacturer's line was tested and found to meet this standard, the company is allowed to include this same statement on other products in the same "family" which provide equal or greater concentrations of all the nutrients.  So even if the pet food carries this AAFCO food trial statement on its label, you cannot be sure that specific product was actually tested!  In addition, testing for six months is not an adequate amount of time to determine if the food would cause deficiencies or what the long term effects would be.

In conclusion -

Be careful of what you feed your pet! Just because a food has pretty colors or a fun shape or even a great commercial showing healthy pets eating seemingly healthy foods, it may not be good for your pet.  Take some time to do a little research and look at labels!  There are great foods out there, you just need to look!