What Do I Feed My Dog Now? Part 1

Dog food warnings!? It has become very difficult to track what is good and safe dog food these days. Let us try to shed some light for you.

Totally confused about what to feed your pets? Don't know whom to trust anymore? You want to give the best possible food, but how do you know what is good for them? What are good ingredients? What are bad ingredients? Is it all just chemical gibberish on the back of the bag? You're not alone. Here are few helpful hints about what you want and don't want to see listed on that pet food bag. (Obviously at this point in time I would suggest staying away from wheat gluten, rice protein, and corn gluten.) They say, oh your dog can eat anything. It's a dog after all. Well, actually a dog's intestinal tract is pretty short, so it doesn't have a great amount of time to absorb nutrients. So we want to have food that is easily digestible with nutrients that are highly bioavailable for our dogs. Oven baked ingredients vs. extrusion You want to look for food that is oven baked. Baking changes the hard-to-digest molecules of "raw" starches into easy to digest dextrines. This process acts as a "pre-digest" of the kibble food, resulting in less strain on the dog's digestive system and produces a greater degree of food absorption. A dog's intestinal tract functions in the most efficient manner when the food is concentrated and can be quickly digested. Lower quality pet food uses a cooking process called extrusion. This process involves rapidly steaming the food, then extruding it under extreme pressure through a metal die. This process expands the food with air (air?! yes, air) and does not produce the highly digestible food that your dog's system requires. This extruded food, because it is cooked in a very short time is usually almost "raw" and requires the addition of chemical preservatives (ethoxyquin, BHA, and BHT, see below) to maintain a reasonable product shelf life. These altered proteins may contribute to food intolerances, food allergies, and inflammatory bowel disease. First couple of ingredients on the list You want some kind of meat whether it is chicken or lamb. You do not want the first ingredient to be corn or some grain or a by-product. (We all know what happens when we eat corn. It tends to not be digested too well, because we end up seeing it again, don't we?) End of Part 1