We Are What We Eat
A Practical Guide to Choosing the Healthiest Commercial Food for Your Dog

by Mary Straus

Editor’s Note: Whether you feed your dog discount store brands, premium kibble or canned, or an organic, homemade raw diet, you need to understand what makes for a healthy choice. We’ll be featuring more articles on healthy feeding in the months to come.  

The recent massive pet food recall has everyone questioning the foods they feed their dogs. As someone who maintains a web site that recommends pet foods, my first thought upon hearing of the recall was whether any of the foods on my site were affected. As it turns out, none of the foods I recommend were included in the initial or subsequent recalls. Coincidence? Just lucky? I don’t think so.

I choose foods to recommend based primarily on the quality of their ingredients. There is no guarantee that pet foods that use high-quality ingredients will never contain anything that might harm your pets, but I think it’s less likely. The contaminated wheat gluten that is suspected to be the cause of the current crisis is a cheap source of incomplete protein that is found only in lower-quality products. Wheat gluten and corn gluten meal are two ingredients I specifically avoid in the products I recommend. Better foods will use animal protein rather than these low-quality plant proteins that provide inferior nutrition for dogs.

What to look for

So, what should you look for when trying to find the best products to feed your dogs? First, try to find foods that use human-grade ingredients. It’s not always easy to tell which foods use such high-quality ingredients, as pet food manufacturers are not allowed to use the term “human grade” on their labels (the only exceptions are a couple of brands that actually are manufactured to human standards, such as the new Natural Balance “Eatables” line). More information is available on a company’s web site than on the packaging. In addition to “human grade,” look for terms such as “organic,” “free range,” “antibiotic free” and “hormone free,” as those indicate high-quality ingredients. Be wary of chicken and turkey products that are labeled only “hormone free,” as it’s illegal to give hormones to poultry, so that label may be meant to mislead you into thinking that the product is better than it really is. Other terms, such as “natural,” “holistic,” “premium,” “gourmet,” “healthy” and “hypoallergenic” are used for marketing purposes and cannot be relied upon to identify higher-quality foods. Also, don’t be fooled by pretty pictures on the package, which may have nothing to do with the food inside.

Next, look for foods that have more meat than grain or other carbohydrates. Dogs have no nutritional need for carbs, which provide less nutritional value to dogs than animal products do. Carbohydrates such as grains and potatoes are used mostly as an inexpensive source of calories, and in the case of dry food, to enable it to be formed into kibble.

Determining how much meat is in a product is not as easy as it seems. Companies can split grains into multiple parts so that it appears there is more meat than grain, when in fact the opposite is true. A food that lists “lamb” followed by three or four grains or grain fragments may well contain much more grain than meat. Choose only foods that list a meat as the first ingredient, and look for those that list more animal products than plant products in the main ingredients (everything before the first fat or oil listed), to help ensure that the food really does have a high percentage of meat.

Too much protein?

People often worry that too much meat will lead to kidney problems later in life, and that older dogs need a lower-protein d