Dog Health Food - Are You Poisoning Your Best Friend?

We want to put the best food into our bodies and we want the same for our dogs, this can be hard to manage sometimes though, dog health food is an important part of giving our dogs the very best. We know more about the preservatives that go into our own food, but what about all the additives that are put into dog food? It's up to us to know what we are giving them.

What is animal meal exactly? Meal is made by processing meat or fish. Cooking it, blending it into a puree and baking it. This sounds like it's not going to affect the content of the meat. However it's one of those cases where they can get away with putting preservatives and other things into the meal, but then it doesn't appear on the ingredients list because it was't added as part of the final processing of the food.

Fish meal is the worst offender as far as toxic preservatives go. The meal is made on the fishing boat while they are at sea and the law says that it has to be preserved with a chemical called ethoxyquin. This is due to the fact that unpreserved fish meal can become extremely explosive. On the surface it seems ok, but ethoxyquin is unfit for human consumption because it's so toxic.

In dogs it has caused problems from skin problems to cancer. Because this preservative is added before the fish meal arrives at the manufacturing plant, it doesn't need to be listed on the list of ingredients. Without a statement saying that there is no ethoxyquin, it's almost certainly in the fish meal.

Other types of animal meal are not always going to be as bad but you won't know just by reading the label. A good guide is to avoid 'animal' meal - would you buy animal meat for dinner? Using the term animal is an easy way to disguise the true origins of the meat. You want to look for specific animal meat like beef and chicken. listed on the ingredients to be sure.

There is still some discussion about whether meal or plain meat is a better option. This is because even though meal is processed and may contain some chemical nasties, it is more concentrated because it's been dried and so has more protein per gram than meat which has a higher water content.

Another tactic that is often used, is to list some sort of meat protein as the first ingredient and the next few being cereals so that it looks like there's plenty of protein when in reality, there's a whole lot of filler and not much meat.

By using too many grains to bulk out the food, your dog is just getting empty carbohydrates. While some grains are part of an ideal diet it's in a quite small proportion to the amount of protein. This can contribute to dogs suffering from allergies and them not really being satisfied by their food. It's like thinking that cake is going to satisfy your nutritional needs. Unfortunately our pooches can't tell us if they like it or not.

Dog health food can get around all of these problems, by making it yourself you can make sure that only the best goes into your dogs dinner. It's simple and will often save you money. Best of all though, you'll be adding years of life to your dog, giving them more energy and doing the best thing for your best friend.