Are there any particular ingredients I should avoid in a dog food?

It can be difficult to know what sorts of ingredients are a positive thing in dog food, and which are unnecessary at best, and even harmful at worst.

As a rough guide, you should always make sure that the product has a high meat content – meat products should always be present in the top few ingredients listed as part of the food, and it might also be necessary to check that when they are, they are meat meal ingredients rather than being inclusive of water. Water content of a meat ingredient can make up about 80% of its total weight, so when you remove that, you'll find that the ingredient should really be placed much further down in the list. This is problematic if this is the only meat product on the list. If, however, it is closely followed by another meat product, it isn't really a big deal.

 

A bigger problem is if the food contains an excessively large amount of grains. Grains are not necessary or natural parts of a dog's diet. More often than not, they are a cheap way of “filling out” a product, and contain either very few beneficial nutrients, or nutrients that are very difficult for the dog to digest and actually make use of in its body. In addition to this, many types of grains can cause allergic reactions – wheat, for example, is thought to be a leading cause of allergies in dog foods, and wheatfeed is generally viewd as being little more than a filler. Corn is another common filler ingredient which can also be present in the form of maize gluten meal or “prairie meal”. There really is no nutritional benefit to this ingredient – simply put, it is the residue, the leftovers, the bits left over from the corn when all the nutritious parts have been taken out for use elsewhere!

Likewise, there's beet pulp, which is controversial to the extent that some claim it to cause problems for the kidneys and liver (although others believe it to be a good source of fiber – but there are plenty of other, less controversial products around to provide more fiber). Look out, too, for brewers rice, the low quality grain which is basically a waste product, and soy products, which (like wheat) are often the cause of allergy problems.

The synthetic vitamin K is also worth avoiding, as it can (according to some critics) be linked to liver problems, and has to a great extent been removed from good quality dog foods because of this. You are also likely to find that certain preservatives and chemicals are used in dog food despite the fact that they are banned in human foods because of beliefs that they are carcinogenic! BHT, BHA, and ethoxyquin are a few examples.

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