Chicken Compared To Chicken Meal

When selecting the best dry food for your dog, why is it better to go with the chicken meal than the pure chicken? Chicken meal is simply chicken that has been baked to remove bacteria and other toxins. Chicken is simply pure chicken. What people dont know about chicken, is that it is made mostly of water. If a label on a bag of dog food says % whole chicken, that is quite misleading as that does not take into account how much of that % of chicken is left after baking it to remove unwanted substances! When the label on the bag says % of chicken meal, your getting more of the chicken because the product has already been baked to remove unwanted affects such as bacteria. Explanation: Converting dry matter basis This can be the hard part. All pet foods have different levels of moisture. Canned foods can have up to % moisture whereas, some dry foods can have as little as %. This is important for reasons. The first is that the food is priced by the pound, and when you buy dog food that is % water you get % food and the rest is water. So the amount of food your pet consumes is small and expensive. The other reason for understanding percent moisture is to help you compare crude protein and fat between brands and between canned and dry. The listings on the label are for the food as it is, not as it would be on a dry matter basis. So without converting both brands of food to a dry matter basis you will not be able to compare them accurately. Fortunately, the conversion is not that complicated. If a dry dog food has % moisture we know that it has % dry matter. So we look at the label and check the protein level that reads %. Next, we divide the percent protein by the % dry matter and we get %, which is the amount of protein on a dry matter basis. Does this make sense so far? Good. Now let us compare this to canned food that has % moisture. We know that with % moisture we have % dry matter. The label shows % protein. So we take the % and divide it by % and we get % protein on a dry matter basis. So the canned food has more protein per pound on a dry matter basis after all the water is taken out. We can do the same for fat, fiber, etc. Good luck calculating.