Choosing the best food for your dog is no easy task…
Author: Sara Baxter
Tranquil Dog Owner, Dog Behavior Specialist/Trainer, Dog Foodie
Choosing the best food for your dog is no easy task. There is so much confusion about what is good and what isn’t. Even if you are diligent and read the ingredients list, many of them are confusing. Names like Brewer’s Rice sound pretty cool, but are they? Rice is good right? What about Grain Free foods? “ I heard that grain free kills dogs” is a common comment I hear.
All excellent questions. So, let’s start at the top. The first thing I would like to say is that I wish all dogs could have manufactured dog food removed from their lives forever, no matter how much the bag costs. It is highly processed using what I call vague ingredients. Always remember that manufacturing dog food is a business and lowering overhead is important to any business, but what is the cost to the dog? How high quality are the ingredients really? After all, it is dog food. What makes me wonder that? The fact that some of them actually claim “human grade ingredients”, which must mean that the rest are not. That is in fact the truth. But in our everyday lives it is not realistic for most people to cook for their dogs, either because of the cost, the time or the research into the complete and balanced dietary needs of the dog. And while I always advocate that whole nutritious foods be added to your dog’s life, this post is designed to help you choose a better bag of dog food.
In a previous post I talked about the fact that I am not against grains if they are healthy and not too prevalent in the food. Most higher quality foods have good grains in them like brown rice, barley, oats and the like. My issues are the quality of the grains and the amounts. For example, white rice is so low in nutritive value that I will not purchase dog food that uses it, at least in the first 10 ingredients. Second example: Brewer’s rice. This one really aggravates me. Sounds cool, it’s not. Should be named something like “highway robbery rice”. Here’s the actual definition on Wikipedia and most other sites:
Brewers’ rice is the small milled fragments of ricekernels that have been separated from the larger kernels of milled rice.[1]Brewers’ rice and second heads are two of the many byproducts that rice milling creates. Second heads are milled rice kernels that are one half to three quarters of the size of original kernel.[2] Brewers’ rice is a milled rice kernel that is one quarter the size of a full kernel.[2] Second heads, depending on their quality, are mostly used to make rice flour, whereas brewers’ rice is used in beermaking and production of other fermented products, and for pet food.[2] “If the quality of the second heads are poor, they will be sold for pet food or dairy feed. Brewers rice is sold for pet food and dairy feed exclusively.”
The question is, is this a dangerous ingredient? By itself it is not, but using a large quantity of it lowers the nutritive value of the food and how does that affect the dog in the long run? Again, we’re talking big picture here. At the very least I would choose a food that does not list a healthy grain until the third ingredient. There are other low-quality grains and I have attached a link at the bottom for your review.
Usually, grain inclusive foods have way too many carbs for a dog. So, I choose a grain free diet for my dog and I add healthy grains to her diet. What grains? Brown, red, black rice and oatmeal usually. The big giant question I get when I say this is the one about grain free dog food killing dogs. Well, there is some truth to that in a very round about kind of way. It is not about the lack of grains that became dangerous to the dogs, it was about what dog food companies replaced them with. I want to remind you that dog food is a business so that is what usually drives the decisions in the board room. It seems to me that sometimes common sense never even makes it through the door of that meeting! Case in point, the addition of mass quantities of legumes in place of the more expensive grains. See this ingredient list as an example:
Three of the first five ingredients are legumes. Think about that being fed to your dog every single day. Lentils are not a bad ingredient, neither are chickpeas, but where is the moderation? This dangerous trend gained a strong foothold somewhere around 2014 and has held fast despite the scientific evidence denouncing it. The problem specifically related to this is Dilated Cardiomyopathy. DCM is essentially a reduced ability for the heart to circulate blood, a weakness if you will, to put it very simply. The most common cause of this in dogs is a taurine deficiency. Science is looking into legumes as a contributing factor in the deficiency. While most dogs manufacture their own taurine in acceptable levels, legumes are highly suspected to be interrupting this process in some way with devastating results. There is a link at the bottom of this post to read what the FDA has said about it, but it is really easy to look up info about this issue.
The bottom line is that the claim that grain free food kills dogs is not telling the whole story. If you really wanted to tell the whole story about how a dog’s health is directly affected by diets then it would probably take a whole library of posts. There are some pretty sketchy ingredients in dog food bags from colors to carcinogens and everything in between.
Incidentally, the bag of dog food that I took the ingredients from costs about $69 for a 25lb bag. Price doesn’t necessarily tell you much.
I have said it before and I will say it again, I am not a veterinary nutritionist, nor am I some kind of genius. The good news is that you don’t have to be to make decent choices for your dog. My advice to you is to not just assume that a bag of dog food is good for your dog. There have been some very irresponsible choices made by the pet food industry so it’s up to you to be your dog’s advocate. These companies know that few people hold a magnifying glass to the ingredients list so they get away with a lot. It is my hope that the research I do will help you make better decisions for your dogs to keep them happy and healthy for a long time. After all, we love them with our whole hearts!
Here are a couple of links for you to read further on this subject:
