The dog food might say it is mostly meat but is it really? Many adverts would suggest that it is, however, there is a twist in words. Now in order to list any source of meat first on the bag or tin label of your pet food, some companies will resort to a number of deceptive practices.
Let look at what is really going on:
The first listings on all pet food would normally be the “wet” ingredients. But it is normally mainly a dry food product. They also know that very few consumers would bother to read further than the second line on the label. Wet meat does get a lot lighter when all the moisture has been cooked out. This type of labeling can be blatantly deceptive to an uninformed public. You might not know but all ingredients should always be weighed and listed on the packaging in their dry weight equivalents so you may know what the true ration is. Now if the pet food label says, “chicken” then it means that the chicken has been weighed when wet. Now you have lost 75% of the value of the ingredient. To understand why to see the writing on ‘chicken meal’ to understand why you have just lost 75% of your nutrition. Simply that wet meat contains 70% water. If it is label as a chicken meal that is another story altogether.
Also if it says meat or chicken by-product more likely than not it was not meat, to begin with. Meat by-products are the leftovers of whatever was a slaughter. This is normally intestines, spinal cords, and brains. Not exactly meat but a by-product of a slaughter.
Now there is another gimmick. Everything is listed according to weight from the top being the heaviest to the bottom meaning the lightest or least. So what would be done is to split the grains in order to keep the meat listed first as it works by weight? As an example. you have 500 grams of chicken and 300 grams of rice. Which goes to the top of the label list? Chicken!
But that is not how it works. This is, however, the consumer is deceived.
This is what you would get on a label. 500 grams chicken, 300 grams ground rice, 300 grams rice bran. Rice actually makes up most of the ingredients but you did not see who it was simply rearranged. Your eye still catches only the 500-gram chicken. You just bought a rice product at the price of a meat product. You can also arrange many others in the same fashion. Rice flour, Brewers rice, and the list can continue. Grains are always cheaper than meat so the mark up on the product is much better.
The same goes for meat and meat by-products. The amino acids are not the same. The animal, however, gets far less nutrition than what is needed even though the food cost more. Yet today by-product is being twisted into actual meat which it is not as explained above.
Be careful what you buy out there!