Chicken in Dog Food

When you look at the ingredients in dry dog food, some list chicken, and some chicken meal. Which is the better choice?

Chicken is, quite simply, just that, that is pure chicken. Chicken meal, however, is chicken which has been baked in order to remove toxins including bacteria. Chicken meat has a high water content. The percentage of chicken listed on a label can therefore be quite misleading, because you don't know how much of the original content is left after the unwanted matter has been removed in the baking process.

If, however, the listed ingredient is chicken meal, then the given percentage is higher in chicken than if it were listed as chicken meat, because this gives you the content after the removal of unwanted substances.

Converting Ingredients to Dry Matter

All pet foods have different levels of moisture content, and this can be as low as 6% in dry foods, compared to up to 80% in canned foods. There are two things which make this an important factor to consider when comparing dog foods. Firstly, the higher the moisture content the less actual food your pet gets to eat, since the food is sold by weight. If, for example, you buy a food which is 80% moisture, then you are only getting 20% of that weight in food. The rest of what you buy is water. Secondly, it is hard to compare different types and brands of food according to the protein and fat content, when the labels give the ingredients as is, not after removal of water content. A dry matter basis for comparison is therefore a much more accurate method of understanding exactly what is in the food your pet eats.

The good news, however, is that this conversion to dry matter is not as difficult a task as you might think.

If, for example, a dry food is labelled as having 10% moisture, then its dry matter content is 90%. Looking then at its protein content and we see that it has 20%. Of this protein content, we know that 90% of it is dry matter. Divide the 20% by 90% and you can see that the dry matter protein content is actually 22%.

Compare this to the example of a canned food which is listed as having 80% moisture content, and 5% protein. Again, divide the 5% by the 20% (which is the proportion of dry matter), and we get the answer 25%. This means that, by weight, the canned food has the greater proportion of protein of the two types of food, on a dry matter basis. We can apply the same procedure to other ingredients we want to compare, such as fiber or fat.

By taking the water out, and making simple calculations (especially with the help of a calculator!), we can get a much more accurate picture of the actual nutritional content of our dogs' food.