How to Read Pet Food Labels

Understanding how to read the labels on your pet food packaging is a useful tool to have. This can get very complex especially when you go into the different types of additives, preservatives, and colours. This blog, however, is just a very simple run-through on how to read certain parts of labels that I find the most important. Especially for people who are aiming at buying a better product for their pet. 

The majority of pet foods are labeled as meeting AAFCO standards. This means that a guideline has been put in place for the minimum and maximum nutrients your pet needs, therefore the pet food company has to meet these guidelines to be able to label their product as balanced and complete.

However, due to the fact that dry pet foods (biscuits/kibble) are so heavily processed, the nutrients are depraved, so to meet AAFCO standards the nutrients are added at the end, usually in a synthetic form. Despite this, pets do not utilise synthetic vitamins and minerals the same as they would if they were fed in their freshest form…therefore it is not as ‘balanced & complete’ as people may believe it to be.

When reading the ingredients on the label, the pet food companies have to state their ingredients from most to least in order of weight.

So when you look at the ingredients section on your pet food label and see a type of meat as the first ingredient e.g chicken, turkey etc, you would expect that ingredient to make up the majority of the food. However, this is all weight before the cooking and processing commence. Once cooked and processed, the meat, which has now lost the majority of its moisture and weight, becomes a lot lighter, so theoretically it moves down the ingredient list. So when you see meat being the first ingredient, you also want to make sure that the second, third, and even fourth ingredient is meat as well, rather than ingredients such as corn, beet pulp, brewers rice, pearled barley etc, as that would essentially mean that you are practically feeding these ingredients rather than meat…..virtually feeding an almost vegetarian diet.
All of those ingredients mentioned above are just used as a filler because they are cheap and bind the biscuits together. These ingredients aren’t very nutritious, and also result in bigger and smelly poos from your pet!

Additionally, as I have mentioned elsewhere on my website, and as I discuss with clients, despite our pets being domesticated they still have the same digestive system as their canine and feline ancestors. Ancestral diets show felines should be receiving 1-2% carbohydrate intake and canines around 14%. Due to dry foods needing these carbohydrate fillers to bind them all together, it brings the carbohydrate intake to around 25-40%, some even more! This can cause multiple long-term diseases, illnesses, and skin conditions as it creates inflammation in the body.

So obviously we want as much meat protein as possible in our pet food correct? Some of the “premium” brand pet food actually state on the packaging that they contain 53% meat, for example. What isn’t pointed out is how much of that meat % is protein. Most of the time a large portion of this meat is actually fat, fat is not a protein, they are very different! Fat is a cheaper cut for pet food companies to use instead of the protein from muscle meats.

Another important tip when reading labels is to look down the ingredient list until you find SALT. Any ingredient listed after the word SALT means that there is less than 1% of that ingredient in the entire packet of this particular food. So for instance, if it says broccoli on the front label, such as “beef, carrot and broccoli” and broccoli is listed after salt, then there is less than 1% of broccoli in that bag of food, which is misleading when there may be a picture of a nice fresh broccoli head on the front of the bag.

I want to briefly discuss prescription diets or veterinary science diets. These are diets that vets may advise you to buy for your pet when they have a particular health concern. However the biggest question you need to ask yourself before you fork out a lot of money on these foods is what exactly are you getting, and why and how is going to help your pet?
As it is a prescribed pet food from your vet, you would expect this food to be medically beneficial, and of fantastic quality with ingredients that will make your pet well again.

Does the word prescription indicate there should be some sort of medicine in it? Well, these diets have no medication in them whatsoever. And the ingredients on the back of the packaging are not much different from regular pet food. So why are they almost 3-4 times the price of regular pet food? On laboratory analysis which compared the four major veterinary science diets for contaminants such as heavy metals, pesticides, and mycotoxins, and then compared those to over 1000 other regular store-bought pet foods, the results proved that the prescription foods were no better, and in some categories, they performed worse. They were no cleaner from contaminants and the quality of the ingredients was the same. Furthermore, 40% of the prescription formulas contained pesticides including glyphosate which is one of the ingredients in the weed killer ‘roundup’. 
There are some of these foods that advertise to help with your pet’s joint care. When looking at the ingredients of the veterinary formulated joint care diets, it is seen that meat is the 4th ingredient listed.. meaning there’s very little meat in the bag, however, flax seeds are in there which is a good omega 3, beneficial for your pet’s joints. Wouldn’t it be better to just feed your dog some fresh meat which is species-appropriate and add in your own flax seeds and some anti Inflammatory foods or supplements? This particular veterinary-formulated diet is around 47% carbs and carbs turn into sugar, this all leads to inflammation which is what you are trying to avoid if your pet has joint issues. This is just one example of how these prescription diets don’t actually have many benefits, especially for the price you pay for them.

With grain-free dry foods, a lot of pet owners are advised to change to these diets in the hope to heal their pet’s skin issues, as the majority of pets are intolerant to grains. However, although these grains are not present, other fillers are added instead which are usually just as bad. And the fact that these dry foods are still very high in carbohydrates, even more so in most cases than regular biscuits/kibble, as mentioned before creates inflammation which ends up contributing to skin issues.

These are just a few basic label-reading tips, and upon consult, I can help you further analyse what your pet is currently getting dietary-wise. Just remember marketing is very clever, just because you may be paying an extortionary amount for food with beautiful photos of fresh meat and vegetables on the packaging, doesn’t necessarily mean that is what your pet is consuming.