Dog Food Ingredients: Why Isn’t A Meat Just A Meat?

Sep
12
2009

Dog Food Ingredients: Why Isn’t A Meat Just A Meat?

Have you looked at the variety of dog food in the markets lately? Browsing over all the bags, they all brag about the great quality of meat they have inside and how healthy the dog food is. But how do you know? You have to learn to decipher the dog food ingredients label to find out.

What is a healthy dog food? A healthy dog food can be broken into 2 components: the right type of food for your particular dog, and the quality of the ingredients. The first part depends upon what kind of dog you have. Is he active? Does he have a medical condition? Is she nursing pups? You first need to determine the type of dog food that best suites your dog.

Independent of the type of dog food, the actual ingredients need to be understood. Are you really feeding nutritious ingredients to your dog or not? A great source of confusion comes when trying to decipher the meats – the main source of protein – as they can be stated as a type of meat, meal, or by-product.

What is the difference between a Meat, Meal, and By-Product? An identified animal meat, chicken for example, means the clean flesh from a chicken. Meal is simply the ingredient that has be dehydrated and ground. So chicken meal is dehydrated, ground up chicken meat. By-product is what is left over after all the usable meat has been removed (like the neck, feet, intestines, etc.) Chicken by-product would be processed and ground up chicken necks, feet, and who really knows what else.

Which is Better – Meat or Meal? Now you look at your dog food ingredients list. Naturally, most people would assume seeing the meat listed as the first ingredient would mean the best food. But in actuality, you want to see the meat in the meal form.

All dog food ingredients must be listed in order of weight. Since a meat still has all of its moisture, it will be heavier than a meat meal. To put it another way, take two pieces of meat that weigh the same. Now dehydrate one. Which one will weigh more – the meat will. The tricky part is that once the dog food is made, all meat is first processed and made into meat meal.

Named Animal Meat vs Generic Category Meat. If the animal protein is from chicken, the label will read chicken, chicken meal, chicken by-product, etc. Now if it is from more than one type of animal, it may say the category of the animal, such as poultry. This means the manufacturer does not know the actual meat origins, just that they are of the poultry family (geese, turkey, chicken, etc). Worse yet, when any and all types of animals are used, it is just listed as ‘meat’, ‘meat meal’, or ‘meat by-product’.

The bottom line is that if a specific animal source cannot be identified, the dog food manufacturer is probably more concerned about their bottom line than the health and well-being of your pet.

There are lots of things that come into play when determining what is the healthiest dog food for your dog. Learn more about how to read your dog food ingredients label at the Healthy Dog Food Blog: assisting you in figuring out what makes a healthy dog food.