Dog Food

When one of my dogs started to have health problems at the age of six, I got pretty serious about dog health issues. I don’t watch TV much anymore, if I have any free time I’m usually doing research to try and improve and extend the lives of my dogs.

People who are acquainted with me also know that I think the main reason for health problems with dogs is the commercial dog food. I have made it my purpose in life to educate people about the best dog food and strongly recommend homemade dog food.

In actuality, the majority of people will need to provide supplemental commercial food in addition to the homemade diet. This is the reason I take a lot of time with the best dog food topic.

One area of controversy that I encountered was the usage of meat by products in dog food. You’ll recognize this because a meat, such as lamb or chicken, will be shown with the word by-product attached.

So what is it and is it good for your dog? If you do research on the subject you will find two groups, one defends by-products as good, and the other saying it is toxic for your pet.

The answer is, it depends; we need to explore what it really means when we say there are poultry by-products.

"Poultry by-products consists of the ground, rendered, clean parts of slaughtered poultry carcass, including necks, beak, feet undeveloped eggs and intestines, exclusive of feathers, "except in such amounts as may occur unavoidably in good processing practices"The problem is you don’t know what is in a by-product ingredient at any give time. There is no standard that says there are so many feet and so many intestines or any consistency of nutritional value what so ever. The truth is none of this stuff is fit for human consumption.

There are some who will make the argument that because some of the by-product ingredients are what the dog would actually eat in the wild, they are fine for them to eat in a dog food. Even if this is the case it is tantamount to saying that because homeless people eat out of garbage cans, dumpster food is great for everyone else, too.

I want to feed my dogs the best dog food, and therefore I’ll be leaving the by-products where they belong and that’s in the dumpster and out of my dogs bowl.

Mike Considine has devoted a big part of his life researching commercial dog food looking for the best dog food for his two dogs. His top ten list points out how to pick the best dog food brands.

Do the big named brands of dog food make them the best dog food selection for your dogs? After studying the matter I’ve come to the conclusion that people are aware of a  brand not because it’s particularly healthy but because it’s a brand that can afford some heavy advertising.

Your vet, unfortunately, does not have the best dog food available for your canine.   Just because a dog food is sold by your veterinarian does not mean it is the healthiest food available.

Because my dog started to have Seizures, I started to research to find out how to pick the best dog food available to keep him healthy. I have learned more about how to decipher a dog food label and understand what all the ingredients are, than most people know about their own human food.

The more research I did, the deeper I entered the ugly world of commercial dog foods.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that I would have to learn some things about the Pet food industry in order to give my dogs the best dog food  that’s out there.

The laws are weak and the industry is basically self regulated, allowing deceptive wording on labels and fooling pet owners into thinking they are buying nutritional value where none exists.

The only law that even comes close to helping us pick the best dog food is the law that states ingredients must be listed in order of predominance by weight. If corn is the initial ingredient listed it is the largest component of the product regardless of what it is called.

Do yourself a favor and ignore the name on the bag and take a look at the ingredient list to determine what the food really is. After looking at the first few ingredients and rubbing your head, then you can look at the rest of the list which you’ll have no clue what the word mean. Yet here I am telling you the label is still the best place to learn what is really in the food.

As you start to look at ingredient lists, your going to see healthy sounding ingredients like dried egg products.  Don’t be fooled this particular ingredient is anything but healthy.  The truth is that what goes into dried egg products is not fit for human consumption, so why would we feed it to our dogs? When something contains chicken by-products is is not of the standard you would serve on your dinner table.

When you look at the listed ingredients of this item, you can figure out some of them, however it will be more difficult to identify the preservatives and vitamins as the names are less familiar.

This why I was happy to find during my research a very strict guide of what to look for on a dog food label, and this is what I use to find the best dog food, for my dogs.

With this guide I have been able to go through a list of 150 brands of dog food, and come up with the best dog food top ten list. It is very obvious once you compare the ingredient list of the 10 best dog food to the brands your Vet probably sells, that you probably shouldn’t be depending on your Vet for a healthy dog food selection.

Here is the best dog food list