What's truly in Your Pet's Food
- Posted on
- By Kelvin Sanke
A brief article on how pet food ingredients are defined.
One of the biggest frustrations with pet owners is knowing what is the best pet food to feed their pets.
There is no single or generic answer to this as there are many factors to consider. These include quality, level of activity, breed, age, sensitivities, and budget. There are many websites out there which give you some guidance to distinguish one brand from another. I think these sites are great to help you separate the low quality brands from higher brands. But when you are comparing brands in the upper echelon I feel they aren’t as helpful. The editors of these sites are not privy to truly knowing what really is going into a bag of food. The only way to truly know what is in a food is to go into the factory to see exactly what is being used.
Looking on the label does not tell the whole story either. Ingredient labels follow rules which are vague and too generic. A common example of this is chicken, labeled as chicken. The definition by AAFCO (the voluntary regulatory body which most pet food companies abide by) states that chicken is void of heads, feathers, feet, and viscera. So you are left with the skin and muscle on the skeleton. Here’s where it gets tricky. Companies who do it right use the muscle and skin while another company will use what’s left over. The skeleton with shards of meat. We know that the fresh meat is a better quality source of protein versus the skeleton. Quality is what really matters. To know what your brand is using you need to know what level of hydroxyproline is in your brand. Hydroxyproline is a non-essential amino acid and can only be determined by a lab test-not standard for most pet food companies. High levels indicate high levels of the skeleton or bone, or the lower quality chicken. So low levels indicate high quality chicken. We all know that higher quality ingredients are more nourishing and more easily digested and assimilated by the body. Which is preferable in a pet food.
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