In your opinion, which dog food would make a better choice: chicken meal or pure chicken?
Chicken meal, for sure, is a lot better than pure chicken. This is because chicken meal has already been processed and cooked to kill bacteria and other unwanted toxins. Chicken is just chicken.
What you might not know about chicken is that it is made mostly of water. If a label on a bag of dog food says 60% whole chicken that is quite misleading as that does not take into account how much of that 60% of chicken is left after baking it to remove unwanted substances.
To understand deeper about dog foods, you need to know that not all dog foods have the same moisture levels. Some canned foods have moisture levels as high as 80% while other dry foods' moisture levels are as low as 6%. This is important for two reasons.
First, since dog food is priced by its weight, it could get quite expensive because when you buy dog food that is 70% water, you are in fact getting only 30% real food.
The other reason for understanding percent moisture is to help you compare crude protein and fat between brands and between canned and dry. The listings on the label are for the food as it is, not as it would be on a dry matter basis. So without converting both brands of food to a dry matter basis you will not be able to compare them accurately.
Conversion is relatively easy. For example, if you have a dog food label that reads 20% moisture and 30% protein, this means that 80% (100% - 20%) is dry matter and the real protein calculated on a dry matter basis is 30/80 = 37.5%. Are you with me?
For canned dog food, you basically perform the same method of calculations. For example you read on the dog food label that it contains 75% moisture and 15% protein. This translates to 25% (100% - 75%) dry matter and 15/25 = 60% protein on a dry matter basis. You can use the same approach for fats and fibers too.
Should you understand how to calculate the amount of protein on a dry matter basis as illustrated above, then you would have a much better understanding of how nutritious a particular dog food is.
