Info on Chicken-Based Dog Food
Most dog owners who are serious about providing their dog with a complete, healthy, and nutritious diet, are familiar with the process of studying the list of ingredients on dog food packaging in order to check that the food is high quality and contains everything that their dog needs. If you've done this, you'll know that one of the main ingredients (and preferably the very top ingredient(s)) should be a meat or meat meal product. This might be beef (or beef meal), or fish (or fish meal), or perhaps one of the most popular meats – chicken (or chicken meal).
What many people don't know, however, is that chicken meal is actually a superior option as a dog food ingredient than chicken itself. This seems a little odd, as we tend to assume that “pure” forms of anything are always going to be preferable, but there is a pretty simple explanation for it. Chicken is, believe it or not, made up mostly of water. So when a dog food lists its top ingredient as “65% whole chicken”, this is not as straightforward as it looks, because of the high moisture content. Chicken meal, on the other hand, is chicken that has been baked for the purpose of removing bacteria and various other toxins – and the baking process obviously removes much of the water content. It follows from this that “65% chicken meal” is going to contain more chicken than “65% whole chicken”, as the whole chicken listing doesn't take into account how much of the 65% would actually be left after removing the water by baking!
To use another example, it's similar to the comparisons between dry dog food and wet (canned) dog food. The high moisture content in canned food means that its calorific density is much lower than dried food. Although the water content of canned food is good for keeping dogs well-hydrated, and so certainly has its benefits, dry food is often preferred by owners because of its much higher density of essential nutrients. Put simply, to receive the same number of nutrients from a canned food and a dry food, a dog would have to eat a much larger amount of the canned food.
This is how it is with the chicken meal as opposed to whole chicken argument. Whole chicken definitely sounds like a much better option because it's chicken in its “pure” form, but a dog would have to eat a large amount of it in order to get the necessary nutritional value out of it. Chicken meal, on the other hand, has basically had everything with no nutritional value sucked out of it, so that much less is required. So, if you had (for example) one dog food whose top ingredient was “70%” whole chicken, and another whose top ingredient was “50% chicken meal”, the chicken meal one is the more likely to contain a higher amount of chicken! If you were to remove the water content from the whole chicken one, the remaining chicken would probably be much lower than the 50% of the chicken meal product.
Misleading, but not deliberately deceptive – it's just an interesting one to know about and look out for when you're trying to make an informed choice!
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