Loving your dog means that you want to keep him in the best of health; giving your furry friend a balanced, high quality and healthful diet is just one of the many ways that you can be sure that you will enjoy a long and happy life with your best pal.
But how do you determine high quality and healthful? There are some tips that you can use to help you decide what is best to feed your dog.
Determining Quality
Generally speaking, lower quality foods are sold in grocery stores while premium foods are sold by vets, in pet specialty stores, and in feed stores. Because of the quality ingredients involved premium foods cost more to produce and cost more to buy. Premium foods will not usually contain no animal by-products, preservatives, artificial colorings, or sugar. Usually the foods will be listed from greatest content to least content. Premium dog foods will usually list some type of protein food, meat, chicken, or fish as the first ingredient.
Next we can do a few calculations to give us clues about the nutritional content of dog foods. A food containing 15% moisture will contain 85% dry products. If the food label says it is 20 percent protein then we have the protein content on a dry matter basis of 23.5%. But that does not mean that all of the protein is readily digested and used by your pet.
The Best Protein Source
Your dog uses high quality protein more fully and has less stool volume than with lower quality proteins. Here is a breakdown of the way that your dog utilizes protein:
- Egg whites and whey protein- 100%
- Muscle meats- 92%. Chicken is slightly higher than beef or lamb.
- Heart, kidney, liver –90%
- Fish, whole soybeans – 75%
- Rice- 72%
- Oats- 66%
- Yeast – 63%
- Wheat – 60 %
- Corn – 54%
For puppies a food with a high quality protein source at a level of 28% is ideal, for adult dogs the level is 18%, and for a pregnant or nursing dog the level is 28%. Your dog will do better on a diet that is 28% protein that lists meat as the first ingredient, than on a 28% protein food that lists corn or rice as a first ingredient because your dog digests more of the meat protein than the corn or rice protein.
Giving your dog a tasty and healthful diet isn’t hard, but you should put as much thought into choosing his diet as you do yours and do your research.
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