Nutro Natural Choice

Question
Hi Kristen,
I feed my 8 year old Lab/Shepherd Nutro's Natural Chioce dry dog food for seniours. (small bites) Is this a good brand? I am concerned because it was included in the pet food recall and I saw alot of other brands that were included in the list for the pet food recall that are not of good quality. Am I feeding my dog good food or bad food?
Sarah

Answer
The foods that were involved in the recall were the cans and pouches of 'cuts and gravy' style. The dry foods were not affected.

I used to recommend Nutro Natural Choice as a good brand, but I believe they have changed many of their formulas, and I'm not as quick to recommend it now. It IS better than the brands you can find in the grocery store or Wal-Mart, but it's not as good as many other foods that cost the same or just a little more per bag.

The main thing that annoys me with Nutro is that they split up different forms of the same ingredient on the label, so it looks like there's more of one than the other, but they're all the same ingredient, so if you added them together, by weight, there would be more of them than whatever ingredient is listed before them. For example, here's an ingredients list from Nutro Natural Choice Chicken, Rice, & Oatmeal Adult dog food:

Chicken Meal, Rice Flour, Ground Rice, Rice Bran, Poultry Fat

Even though the first ingredient is chicken meal, leading you to believe that the bulk of the food is chicken, the following three ingredients are all rice. Combine them, and they will outweigh the chicken meal. That means that the food is mostly rice, by weight. This is a sneaky way of making consumers believe there's more or less of a particular ingredient, and is called 'splitting.'


In the food you feed (Nutro Natural Choice Senior Brown Rice & Lamb Meal formula), here are the first several ingredients:

Whole Brown Rice, Lamb Meal, Rice Bran, Natural Flavors, Poultry Fat, Soybean Oil, Rice Gluten, Oatmeal, Oat Bran, Sunflower Oil


There is CLEARLY more rice in this food than there is lamb meal, because not only is rice listed as the first ingredient, but it's also listed as the third and seventh ingredients. Rice gluten is a by-product of the milling process, and contains no nutritional value. It's what's left over after all the nutritious parts of rice is removed.

Nutro also uses menadione (synthetic vitamin K), which I REALLY do not like to see. You can read more about why here:

http://www.dogfoodproject.com/index.php?page=menadione

I'm not a fan of feeding senior foods, as they are often of inferior quality to the original adult formulas, and this is a prime example. I would not recommend this food at all.

According to http://www.dogfoodanalysis.com your food rates a 2 out of possible 6 stars.

http://www.dogfoodanalysis.com/dog_food_reviews/showproduct.php?product=1010&cat...