How to Understand Pet Food Labels

From advertising hype to scientific claims, there’s a lot of written information on pet food packaging. You’ll find nutritional charts and long lists of ingredients, but understanding what they tell you about your pet’s food can be tricky. Once you know what it all means, from the largest print to the smallest detail, you can make educated choices about what to feed your pet.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Check what the product is called. The basic rule is that if the main ingredient is used in the product’s name, then it must make up at least 95 percent of the food. So a pet food called “Beef for Dogs” would have to be 95 percent beef. Look out for trick words and descriptions like “beefy,” “meaty,” "salmon-flavored" or "chicken dinner" which are all giveaways that the food contains only tiny amounts of that meat or none at all!

2. Read the pet food claims that are usually written in huge letters across the bag. They’ll be terms like “well-balanced," “all-natural,” “complete” or “100% nutritious.” These claims must be proven and you should find the feeding test statement on the bag (in smaller print, of course). Read these statements carefully so you are not fooled. “All-natural,” for example, simply means that the product contains no chemical additives, colors or preservatives. It does not mean the food is organic.

3. Find small-print statements that let you know how the food is made. The higher the quality, the more they will tell you about it! The cheap, but less nutritious, way to produce pet food is to extrude or remove the moisture from the ingredients, then press them together to form a dry kibble. “Semi-moist” foods provide no teeth cleaning and usually have many added chemicals to keep them moist and looking meaty. Rather choose a product that is slow-baked or twice-baked, which preserves as many nutrients as possible.

4. Note the feeding recommendations on the back of the bag. The less nutritious the food, the higher the quantity of food recommended will be, based on quality and digestibility of the ingredients.

5. Turn the bag to the side and look for the “guaranteed analysis.” Note that this chart only shows the food’s minimum amounts of crude protein, fat, carbohydrate and water before processing. It gives you no indication as to the digestibility, absorption or the quality of the nutrients themselves. The chart does guarantee mineral amounts of calcium, phosphorous, magnesium, sodium and linoleic acid for dogs, and taurine and magnesium for cats—a helpful indicator of minerals the food contains.

6. Locate the ingredients list, which will be the smallest print on the bag. Look for real food words like meats, vegetables, brown rice and natural preservatives. Stay away from foods whose main ingredients are carbohydrate fillers, like soy, wheat and cornmeal, and animal by-product meal as they are indigestible to your pet and are common allergens. Also stay away from foods that contain many chemical preservatives (with names you cannot pronounce) and numbered artificial colorings.

Tips & Warnings

• You can research different pet foods online as well as in stores. All the nutritional and ingredient information is listed on most pet food websites.
• Watch out for large company brands from the grocery store aisle, as they have huge advertising budgets. Do your own research and read their labels extra carefully.