Healthy Nutrition through Dog Food Comparison
There is a large variety of dog food available and it comes in many brands. It is important for you, as a pet owner to read the pet food label carefully. You must read and understand the label in order to make a dog food comparison so that you can distinguish between the desirable and the less desirable ingredients of the dog food.
Questions to Ask
Hence for you to understand a dog food comparison chart and to determine the quality of the pet food, you must ask yourself the following questions. Is quality meat one of the first two ingredients on the label? Or does the food have high-quality ingredients at all? Does the bag have a date for freshness and can these ingredients be consumed by humans?
Know Dog Food Ingredients
If you read through a dog food comparison chart, the ingredients are listed in descending order by weight. For example, if corn is listed as one of the first three ingredients, the quality of the food is not good, because corn is a less desirable food as it is difficult for dogs to digest. On the other hand chicken or fresh chicken liver are desirable ingredients, and if they are listed as one of the first eight ingredients, it is a good choice.
For the purpose of dog food comparison the company "Flint River Ranch" manufactures dog food and the ingredients are so good that they are even fit for human consumption. The ingredients contained are, for example, chicken meal, whole wheat flour, ground rice, lamb meal, poultry fat or dried whole egg.
What You Should Avoid
Often waste products are used in pet food and you should be able to determine its value when conducting a dog food comparison. Meat by-products or meat and bone meal or even brewer's rice, which is a waste product of the alcohol industry are common ingredients. These products are often poorly digestible and they fail to provide adequate nutrition. Of course food fragments are always lower cost by-products of another food manufacturing process.
Meat products are fine, but for dog food comparison purposes, avoid meat by-products, which consist of organs and parts which are not suitable for human consumption. This could include blood, intestines, lungs, bones, ligaments, heads, feet and feathers.
The same applies for animal fat, so look for a named fat source like chicken or poultry fat during your dog food comparison. These fats can be naturally preserved, and are easy for pets to digest unlike other fat sources, which could even be restaurant grease, and these oils are generally too rancid and not edible for human beings.
Avoid chemical preservatives as much as possible, because most of them are cancer causing agents. If your pet consumes them every day there could be a build-up of chemicals in its body and prove to be harmful at the end. In the dog food comparison, check that there are no sweeteners, because corn syrup, sugar or cane molasses are often used to preserve lower quality foods to make them tasty. Avoid sugar, because it can aggravate health problems for your pet.
