Dog Health Food Your Golden Retriever Could Be Suffering If They Arent Getting The Right Food

Golden Retrievers might eat anything but if you're not feeding them dog health food at meal times, you could be causing them serious long term harm. It's not your fault that the dog food manufacturers are always looking for ways to boost profits and cut costs. But make sure you act before your dog ends up as a statistic on the next dog food recall list.

These days you need to make sure that there's no recall of your dog's food. Not only that, there's a lot of questions around the actual nutritional value of commercially produced dog food. As companies look for ways to increase profit margins, if they can find a cheaper alternative to existing ingredients, then they're probably going to be using it.

Over 100 different types of dog food were recalled in 2007 due to contamination with melamine. This is a type of plastic and certainly shouldn't be in any dog food. Eventually the source was found to be rice protein and wheat gluten, neither of which have any real nutritional value for dogs. So at the end of the day it doesn't matter what the standards are at the US factory if they are using tainted ingredients in the first place.

This was a couple of years ago, but what has changed to prevenet it from happening again? I'd say not enough when you think that human milk powder was discovered recently which was contaminated with melamine. And if this is happeneing in the human food industry, with it's much stricter controls, then what's going to end up in our dog food? I know I don't want to be on a list of statistics of dog owners affected by the next batch of tainted dog food that ends up on the market. Today we need to not only make sure that our dogs are getting the right nutrition, but also we need to make sure that their food is actually safe for them to eat.

Apart from the accidental toxins that may end up in your Golden Retriever's food, what about the everyday ingredients? How safe are they really?

Often there's a toxic preservative called ethoxyquin present in dog food. For decades it has been banned for human consumption because of links to canine diseases like cancer, dermatitis and liver failure. But this nasty chemical gets slipped into our dog food under another name or in another ingredient. If there's fish meal in your dog food, there's almost certainly ethoxyquin in there too. In most cases the only time you'll see it listed is when they say it's not there.

Now have a look and see if there's fish meal in your dog food and make sure that you're not harming your dog. The protein in fish is good but it certainly isn't worth the toxic additives that go along with it. Fish is a great source of omega 3 but it can contain nasty additives that aren't going to be listed.

This is just a small sample of the things that are really getting into your Golden Retriever's food. Dog health food is something that is becoming fast regarded as a standard precaution to ensure your dog's health. Best of all it's easy and fun too.