I don't know about you, but my pup loves to eat. Thinks it's pawsome. If he's going to do so much of it I want to try to make sure it's giving him what he needs. The chicken bones he finds around the trash can while scavenging at the park aren't going to cut it. On today's pupdate we take a bite out of one final area of what we at Wags look for in a good food. Last week we covered proteins and the week prior we looked at the major components that are critical to getting your furiend what they deserve in a food.
Non-Proteins Additions
- Corn Gluten Meal: dried residue from corn after removal of the larger part of the starch and germs and the separation of the bran by a process employed in wet milling manufacturing of corn starch and syrup or by enzymatic treatment of the endosperm.
- Brewers Rice: the small milled fragments of rice kernels that have been separated from the larger kernels of milled rice. Brewers rice is a processed rice product that is missing many of the nutrients contained in the whole ground rice and brown rice thus reducing the quality
- Wheat Middlings: The product of the wheat milling process that is not flour
- Powdered Cellulose: Minuscule pieces of wood pulp or other plant fibers
- Mixed Tocopherols: Vitamin E (alpha tocopherol) usually used in conjunction with vitamin C. It is used as a natural preservative.
- Animal Digest: A protein (of sorts) that has been treated with heat, enzymes and/or acid (often phosphoric acid) in a way to concentrate it's flavor. Qualifies as 'natural' and as 'flavor.'
- Chelated (or proteinated) minerals: minerals that have been combined chemically with amino acids to form “complexes." This makes them more absorbant. Example “zinc amino acid chelate” or “zinc proteinate."
- Scientific name followed by “fermentation product:” this is an isolated colony of probiotics that have been dried and added to a food to reactivate once eaten.
Lot's of weird words here. It's hard to get away from some of these items. Many of them are used as preservatives, flavor enhancements (as if my dog cares), or binding agents that hold kibble bites together. Remember, the lower these are on the ingredient list, the less prevalent they are in the food.
Vitamins
- Vitamin A - Retinoic acid, retinol, carotenoids, retinyl ester, retinoids
- Vitamin B1 - Thiamine
- Vitamin B2 - Riboflavin
- Vitamin B3 - Niacin, nicotinic acid
- Vitamin B5 - Pantothenic acid
- Vitamin B6 - Pyridoxine
- Vitamin B7 - Biotin
- Vitamin B9 - Folic acid
- Vitamin B12 - Cobalamin
- Vitamin C - Ascorbic acid, ascorbyl-2-polyphosphate
- Vitamin D - Ergocalciferol
- Vitamin K - Menadione
- Calcium and Phosphorus - Calcium Phosphate
- Copper - Copper sulfate
- Manganese - Manganese sulfate
- Iodine - Calcium iodate
- Selenium - Sodium selenite
Gotta get your vitamins right? These are good vitamins, many of which you will find stuffed into (naturally or unnaturally) into our own human food. Most are in small quantities as our bodies 1) don't require much and 2) have a fine balance to maintain and too much (or too little) can result in an unhealthy imbalance.
Stay tuned next week as we will be going over some major dealbreakers, ingredients that make us automatically put the food back on the shelf!