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Providing Excellence in Pet Nutrition since 1997
Your goal as a conscientious pet owner should be to provide your dog or car with a quality, nutritious diet. It can be very difficult to make the proper dietary choices, without first having a clear picture of what a dog or cat is inherently designed to eat. They are born carnivores. If you examine their tooth structure, you will find that they have incisors, pointed teeth that are used to rip and tear meat.
Knowing that they are meant to eat meat leads to ask a very simple, very important question: Why are the overwhelming majority of commercial pet foods comprised mostly of grains, not meat?
In this website, we hope to enable you to discern critical information about meat and grain composition on a pet food label. It is also our goal to define both favorable and unfavorable ingredients in a particular diet.
The pet food industry in our country is controlled by large corporations that represent the leading brand names that we all know. However, we feel that profit is the primary driving factor behind these brands, not creating a healthy diet on which your pets will thrive.
Protein Quality
Understanding the canine's or feline's essential amino acid (protein) needs is critical to good nutrition. As a natural carnivores to good nutrition. As natural carnivores (meat eaters), both dogs and cats are better suited for digesting meat-based proteins than vegetable-based proteins. Meat proteins naturally create the proper stomach acid balance needed for a dog or cat to properly digest food.
Dogs and Cats are Carnivores
With this understanding, we would like to give you some insight on how to select a pet food that contains a high level of protein derived from meat. read food labels carefully. Ingredients are listed in quanity order by weight, prior to processing. Many pet food companies are deceiving you, the consumer, into assuming that their products are mostly meat!
"Real" Meat Versus Meat Meal
Many leading pet food manufacturers use terms like "made with real meat", or "chicken/beef formula" to assert that high levels of meat are being used. The first thing to look at on the ingredient panel is the meat content. For example, look for "chicken", "chicken meal", or "chicken by-product meat." Which is preferable?
Chicken by product meal" can be an inconsistent ingredient. Low quality by-product meal, found in most commercial pet foods, can contain impurities such as internal organs, feet, heads, and feathers, all of which are allowed by manufacturing standards!
"Chicken" indicates a wet ingredient containing 70% or more moisture. This can give the illusion of meat predominance in the finished product. Because most of this moisture evaporates during the cooking process, the end product loses almost 2/3 of this ingredient by weight that it started with!
30% Chicken 70% Moisture (evaporates)
"Chicken Meal" is the dehydrated (10-11% moisture) edible protein ingredient, free of by-products. This represents the most concentrated source of meat protein.
90% Chicken 10% Moisture
A specific meat meal (for example, "chicken meal" or "lamb meal") should be a primary ingredient (first or second position on the label) in your pet's diet!
Carbohydrate Quality
Grains,
especially whole grains, are good sources of energy for your pet. They should not, however, be the predomoinant ingredient in the food. As a general rule, make sure that grains are not being used as a substitute source of protein, as in the case of many low quality, meat protein-deficient foods.
Avoid grain fragments such as "mill run" or "brewer's rice" or a listing of several different fragments of the same grain ("rice bran", "rice gluten", brewer's rice", etc.). When added together, the total amount of these fragments usually surpass the quantity of meat in the food!
Fat Quality
Essential fatty acids (fats) are critical to the health of your pet. The two basic groups that are essential in a dog's or cat's diet are Omega 6 (linolenic) fatty acids, and Omega 3 (linoleic) fattty acids. Good sources of these fatty acids can be found in both animal and plant sources, including:
Avoid non-descript fat sources like "animal fat", which is often low in fatty acid quality. A deficiency in quality fatty acids can lead to chronic ear infections, and poor skin and coat health.
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