To learn what is in your pet’s food, you must go beyond the marketing hype on the bag and read the ingredient list. Here are some standards and definitions based on the American Association of Feed Control Officials (AAFCO). You can learn much more by accessing their website. It will be an eye opener, not to mention a can opener!
Any pet food label that says premium, gourmet, natural or organic is not required to contain any ingredient different or of higher-quality from any other food. They are only marketing terms to attract your attention. Furthermore, there are quality standards for certain wording. For instance:
- If the label says rabbit dog food, then at least 95 percent of the product must contain rabbit.
- If the label says chicken and liver, the products added together must contain at least 95 percent chicken and liver.
- If the label uses the words dinner, platter or entrée, it only needs to contain 25 percent of that ingredient. Salmon entrée for cats, for instance, only needs to contain 25 percent salmon.
- If the label says chicken and fish dinner, the chicken—the first ingredient—must be 25 percent of the contents. The second ingredient named—fish, in this case—only has to be 3 percent of that total.
- An ingredient followed by with only has to contain 3 percent of that product. For example, a can of “cat food with tuna” means that tuna may only be 3 percent of the product. If it says tuna cat food, however, it must contain at least 95 percent tuna.
- If the label says flavored, the flavor needs only to be detectable in the food; there is no minimum percentage.
Marketing Ploys
Manufacturers use several ingredient-based marketing ploys that appeal to your emotional needs. Some premium food companies tout a product that contains “whole chicken or beef” as better than foods that contain corn or meat meals. But what’s important is the nutrients in a specific ingredient. You cannot predict a food’s performance based on the ingredient list because too many factors come into play. These include the amount of the ingredient, the quality of the ingredient and the exact nutrient composition of the ingredient.
Ingredient lists can be misleading, and claims are sometimes unsubstantiated. Real meat might be the first ingredient on a dry dog food label because it contains more of this by weight than the other ingredients. What they don’t tell you about is the water weight, which is removed in the process of creating a dry food with the ingredients. If they used this corrected weight, the ingredient would be far down on the list.
The order of ingredients can be manipulated in the opposite way. This is called ingredient splitting. Let’s say you want to see how much protein, carbohydrates or fats the food contains, based on a percentage of each. They can split all the carbohydrates into different names like corn, rice, wheat or oatmeal, which puts each one low on the list of ingredients. This leads you to think that this diet is low in carbohydrates. If you add them all up individually, you might see the diet that you are looking at is high in carbohydrates and low in protein.
Source: Tony Buffington, DVM, MS, Diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Nutritionists.