Tips for Choosing the Best Dog Food

Posted by Neeta on Dec 31, 2015 in Dogs, Pet Care, Pet Health | Comments Off on Tips for Choosing the Best Dog Food

With so many nice-looking options on the market, choosing the best dog food for your beloved pooch is quite confusing. Moreover, there are various specifications like foods for small dogs and big ones, thin ones and fat ones, lazy ones and active ones, and so on. Therefore choosing the cheap best dry dog food online or offline becomes an overwhelming task. Let’s see, what best you can do.

Healthy?

You want healthy food for your dog. But what does that mean? Healthy dog food should in fact contain basic nutrition, adequate fat, protein, fiber and moisture. But most importantly, it should fulfill the safety regulations set by the FDA.

The Most Basic Requirements

On an average, a dog needs a diet containing 50% vegetables, 10% grain and 40% meat. When the dog grows, it needs at least 18% protein, while puppies need at least 22%. So also, all dogs need some amount of fat, the amount varying with activity level. And at least 4% of fiber is also needed by all dogs. When you choose food for your dog, it’s best to start by studying with the labels.

Studying Labels

The best way to check the quality of dog food is to study its ingredients. Maybe in the beginning, you get daunted, but with time, you can get a practice of finding if there are any unnecessary products involved which may disturb the digestive system of your pet.

Some manufacturers use a trick of breaking the ingredients in several smaller ones and list them individually. E.g. they will mention chicken first and then ground corn, corn bran and corn gluten further down, which may make you think that chicken is the chief ingredient; however, when you group the corn items together, they are more likely to be more than chicken.

See to it the labels include the following:

• Minimum crude fat
• Minimum crude protein
• Maximum moisture
• Maximum crude fiber

More Things to Look for

Our dogs are fortunate that there are many healthy foods are easily available for them. Plus, you too can make your own recipe after doing some research and consulting with your vet. Here are some suggestions:

• Choose vitamins C and E as they are natural and healthy additive.
• Choose grains like brown rice, barley, quinoa, millet and rolled oats.
• Choose omega-3 because it is healthy for your dog’s coat.
• Avoid wheat, soy, corn and cornmeal because they are hard for your dog to digest and also may cause allergies.
• Avoid byproducts of animals like feet, heads and other parts.
• Avoid additives and preservatives; they have been proven to cause health issues in dogs.
• Choose organic and/or natural ingredients. You may find a dog food pack labeled “Natural” which means nothing, as there is no regulation to define this. Therefore it’s important to sieve through the ingredients.
• Find the first fat source mentioned on the label to find the main ingredients. E.g. if chicken fat is on the seventh position on the list, the ingredients before it are major and those after it are secondary.

On TopDogTips.com, you will find reviews and comparisons of best dog foods which will help you in buying just the right food for your beloved dog.