Do you know what is in your dog's food? What are bad ingredients in dog food anyway?
You want to give your dog the best food, but it is not easy to understand exactly what is in the food. Find out which dog food ingredients you should avoid in your dog food so you can feed your pet the highest quality food your pet deserves.
Don't just trust the brand or the name of the food, as pet food companies can use tricks to make their food look better than it really is. Packaging and advertisements can be misleading, but the ingredient list offers a truer insight into what's actually in your dog's food.
Check the dog food ingredients label to make sure it doesn't contain any of these common but potentially harmful dog food ingredients. You might even want to test your own food, as some of these ingredients can also be found in human food. Choose one of the suggested healthy alternatives instead.
Meat and meat meal
Meat is healthy for your pet. Meat is the largest part of your dog's daily diet. However, if you see "meat meal" or "meat and bone meal" instead of "meat" in the ingredients, you know your pet is getting the worst source of meat they can get from dry food!
If dry food manufacturers include the words "fits all" and obscure ingredient names, you can only guess what they contain. These dog-harmful ingredients are always leftovers, and the only ones
the guarantee is that no quality standard is guaranteed!
The ingredients can come from sick, dead animals, expired meat sections of grocery stores (complete with plastic packaging), or even tumors from animals.
Once this Frankenstein concoction is prepared, it is thoroughly heated to eliminate any potential pathogens (they certainly are). This process also destroys most of the nutrients that might be present in these questionable ingredients.
The result is a hard-to-digest, nutrient-poor food that "boosts" the protein percentage in your dog's food package, but provides very little usable protein for your pet.
A healthy alternative to look for in the ingredients: meat and meat meals
Look for real meats you recognize, such as whole boneless chicken, turkey, lamb, beef or salmon, or meals of these meats. These ingredients are probably less processed and contain more natural nutrients and usable protein.
Animal by-products
Another uncertain source of protein. Animal by-products are all the remains of the animal after all the meat and bones have been removed (likely to be used in the meat and bone meal mentioned above).
What does that really mean? Animal by-products are not bad. Legislation states that they must not contain feathers, nails, hair, hides, beaks and other inedible parts of the animal. Organ meat is an animal byproduct and is a healthy part of pet food.
The problem with animal byproducts, and the reason they're on this list, is that they're nutritionally inadequate. Unnamed animal by-products can be so processed,
that the pet is left with little or no nutrients.
Also, by-products are often cheaply sourced, so you never know if the by-product in your pet's diet is actually providing valuable nutrition. If you want to use healthy animal by-products, look for foods that use named animal parts such as heart, liver or kidney, rather than unnamed and questionable animal by-products.
Healthy alternative: Choose meat
Again, why choose anything else when your dog and cat need real meat the most? Fresh meat - rich in nutrients and minimally processed.
Meat broth
Meat broth is another unspecified source of meat obtained by chemical or enzymatic hydrolysis of non-decomposing animal tissues. It is basically a mixed “meat” broth that has been thoroughly processed. It is used as a flavoring agent, sprayed on dog food to suppress unpleasant flavors and compensate for the lack of actual meat flavor.
According to the FDA, “Regarding flavors, pet foods often contain 'broth', which are materials that have been treated at high temperatures, with enzymes and/or acids to form concentrated natural flavors. It only takes a small amount of "chicken broth" to make chicken-flavored cat food, even though no chicken is added to the food.
A healthy alternative: choose better quality
The inclusion of animal processing or any type of broth indicates that the food contains insufficient meat protein. After all, if there is plenty of healthy, nutritious and protein-rich meat in the diet, why the need to add meat flavor?
How to recognize a good dog food?
Super-premium, minimally processed feeds contain e.g. free-range chicken, organic vegetables and fresh fruits enriched with antioxidants.
Quality feed does not contain cheap, dubious ingredients that many manufacturers use to make big profits or make feed impossibly cheap.
Unfortunately, big, popular brands call their feeds premium feeds, but look at their composition!
We. Zorro.lv has placed ONLY the highest quality food on our website, which helps pets to sort out their health problems and keep themselves in shape every day!
Price is not always an indicator of quality, but the ingredient list doesn't lie – as long as you know how to read it. The first step is to check whether these ingredients are present in your dog's food. There are so many good, healthy types of food that you can include in your dog's diet. Make your dog happy with the highest quality food!