4 Popular Dog Foods to AVOID?

 

                    4 Popular Dog Foods to AVOID?

 

these are four of the most popular dog food brands that I would personally not feed as a nutritionist and a research dog mom starting with Purina oh and make sure you stay tuned because at the end I will be sharing three brands that I absolutely love and one of the first things that stood out to me was the immediate ingredient splitting and in the first four ingredients of this bag you see meat once and you see corn and rice three times and what I mean by ingredient

 splitting is that you see that they have corn in here in two different ways this to me is highly misleading to pet parents especially if it's not something you know to look for I'm also not a fan of the fact that Purina is widely known as being feed grade not human grade in the meat that they add in their food feed grade are foods or meats that are unfit for human consumption I feed my dogs foods that are human grade again fit for human consumption this food also has several controversial ingredients that researched pet parents myself or integrative or even holistic

 veterinarians would never recommend to feed or would feed their personal dogs one example is soybean first off because it is widely known to be highly GMO and even more than that it's often just added to a food as a cheap filler ingredient because what it can do is increase the protein percent so that the food looks like it has more protein when it comes to foods that I eat or feed my dogs I prioritize foods and meats that are sourced responsibly ethically or sustainably and I couldn't find any of that information with Purina so their

sourcing is Highly Questionable and also they add caramel coloring to their food like why does my dogs have limited color seeing ability need coloring added to their food and these natural flavors that we just don't really know what they are let's talk about one more really popular one that I personally would avoid which is from now this brand used to be highly respected in the pet nutritionist Community now is this brand the worst one on the market of course not is it one of the ones that I would initially gravitate to no and I'll

 explain why in a second but some of the pros of this food is the fact that it's family owned it's made right here in the US out of Wisconsin and it is a pretty evidently pet focused brand not only profit driven just based on my personal research but in some of their foods like this bag for example they have ingredients in there that I personally would not feed my dog they ingredient split at least three times so they did this with rice barley by Pearl and whole barley as well as potatoes by adding sweet and regular potatoes to be frank

 I'm also not a big fan of oat Groats this high in ingredient deck when paired with so many other what I personally consider lower quality filler ingredients now this next one kind of hits home for me because it is a brand that I remember feeding probably over 10 years ago I remember buying the bag of Wellness for my Labrador I think I got it from Petco or PetSmart when I thought it was a really high quality brand in the first seven ingredients alone you have barley oatmeal peas potatoes I also typically avoid foods that add things

 like natural flavorings because my question back to the brand is if it is such high quality and if your food is species or biologically appropriate which means Foods or ingredients that were designed to be digested by dogs then why do we need to add flavorings think about the human food category for snacks Ultra processed snacks that you would go buy potato chips cookies cereals and you look at those ingredients what are you going to find you're going to find natural or artificial flavorings the key is flavorings why do they add that in there

 to get us to want to eat it more and more and more so we don't want to eat anything else again their sourcing to me is questionable comment below if you know how they Source their animals but I don't see anything about responsible Source Humane sourcing ethical or sustainable sourcing which is a concern for me in addition to that this is also a cooked and extruded kibble which is basically again just the most Ultra processed form of food that a dog can eat which is why you're going to see at the last part of the ingredient deck the

 last 23 plus ingredients are vitamin synthetics these are synthetic or artificial ingredients that are added to add some kind of nutrition back to the food because it's all really mostly and primarily cooked out now before I jump into Taste of the Wild which I'm asked about frequently let's talk about Canaday and then I'll go into three brands that I absolutely love so Canada was a really popular food again among pet nutritionists and really researched pet parents but it's not one of the ones

 that again I gravitate to Super quickly or would gravitate to let's look at these ingredients this is just mind-boggling to me six are non-meat filler ingredients like turkey meal lamb meal brown rice white rice rice bran oatmeal barley peas and potatoes and when I see ingredients like that I can't help but picture crackers like fortified crackers or fortified bowl of cereal and feeding that to my dog if I was feeding any of these Brands one of the first things I would do and make sure I did every single day is of course always

having fresh plain water readily available in addition I would be adding hydration natural hydration to the bowl that to me would be critical examples raw goat milk bone broth with no salt or seasonings added a raw goat kefir are just a few examples and just like these other brands Canada is ingredient splitting look at this they have rice in here in three different forms and just like the others this one has over 1920 synthetic vitamin packs in here and vitamin synthetic packs aren't necessarily the worst thing in the world

 it's just when you combine it in my opinion with all of these other cheap filler ingredients the production process where it's manufactured and cooked at such high temperatures and all the other things we talked about it just is a lot of no's and negatives for me to where it's just not worth it especially since some of these brands are a little bit more expensive than others okay now let's talk about Taste of the Wild my mom actually fed this to my dogs growing up for a period of time so I grew up

 really being comfortable around Taste of the Wild and the reason I wanted to show this brand because I want you to look at the back of the bag on the guaranteed analysis and look how high this protein percent is 32 this is much more up my alley now I do wonder if a good chunk of this protein percent is coming from non-meat animal sources or non-animal sources which is something that I'm not the biggest fan for example they add sorghum and Millet which sorghum and Miller are actually fairly similar ingredients so it does make me question

 whether or not they are trying to ingredient split without being overtly obvious about it now me even though I spend so much time researching dog food and reaching out to Brands directly to their formulators directly to their decision makers I almost missed this next part and when I saw it I was really frustrated and is why I actually added it to this list because it is a little bit more of a popular food within the pet nutritionist community in some and that is they do a lot of marketing around the fact that their food has

 probiotics and blueberries which we all know can be healthy for dogs and that is a marketing tactic and the reason I say that is because if you look at the ingredient deck you look really closely the blueberries and the probiotics that they add is after salt and as I said before anything in that ingredient panel after salt is going to represent less than one percent of the entire bag that means it's basically negligible in my opinion and it really frustrates me when I feel misled and they also add natural

 flavorings in this which is a really generic term to say that this could be a multitude of things to enhance the flavor again why do we need to enhance the flavors now let's jump into the foods that I do love and these will all be linked Down Below in the fact I have a dog food list where not only do I list the foods that I love in all categories from kibble to cooked to Raw to freeze dried in all treats I even give you why and I do that because I never want that list or any of my videos to tell you what to do instead I want these

 resources to serve as a tool for you to do more research explore connect with your vet and hopefully even find a more holistic or Integrated Vet that is more open to you feeding a fresher diet if that's something you're more open to now three foods on Amazon that I love first is actually brand new to Amazon oh by the way if you got value from this it would mean the world if you click that subscribe button to help our mission to save all the damn dogs like my foster here Marlo and the first brand is front

of the pack this is a very special food and it's one I trust wholeheartedly and the few reasons I love it it is sourced responsibly there are zero vitamin synthetics and when you look at the front of the bag that's why they call it front of the pack all the ingredients are on the front this is also air dried at low gradual slow temperatures which retains so much more of the moisture the more the nutrients the protein the much more bio available makes the food more palatable but it's still easy to feed

 and shelf stable open Farm now open Farm has some Kibbles that I like more than others so I will have a link below the one that I like specifically one thing I love about this brand that really stands out is that they have really transparent sourcing probably one of the best sourced Foods in terms of Humane responsible sourcing in the extruded Ultra processed kibble category and of course if you followed me for any length of time you know that I'm a big fan of karna 4 and carnivore is family owned it is the one of the only synthetic free

mean no synthetic vitamins kibble on the market and unlike all the other Kibbles we talked about today this kibble is baked meaning it's not cooked and extruded at high temperatures it's baked at lower temperatures which again can help retain some of that moisture and definitely retain more of the nutrients and protein in there which is why they don't need to add any at all vitamins synthetics or artificial ingredients or flavorings because the food the nutrients everything it all comes from real whole ingredients again all of

 these will be linked down below and I also have a full shop page of all of my dog favorites from beds to shampoos to supplements to toys to bowls leashes and harnesses you name it don't forget to click that subscribe button and check me out on Tick Tock and Instagram and Facebook at Rachel fasaro where you'll get daily updates on my foster dog Marlow and daily dog tips and I hope you have a beautiful day goodbye foreign.