Just when you start to understand human food labels, you realize your dog’s food has a table with its mysterious “Guaranteed Analysis”. Should you go with the wet food with its apparently higher numbers or the convenient dry food? The first step is to go to a reputable store that sells dog food in West Palm Beach and to steer away from the grocery store. Once that is done, you can compare quality foods as opposed to the filler-heavy alternatives found next to the laundry soap.
With items such as fat, fiber, and protein, this handy little label will tell you whether it should fall under your dog’s “acceptable” food list or if it should be left on the shelf. In human food, the FDA will evaluate each food and take random samples of the food where they will break it down and find the average value for each line of the nutritional analysis report. How accurate is this, though, with the known degree of error? The acceptable margin of error is a staggering 20%! This means that something that says it contains 100% of your daily vitamin C may only have 80% but may have as much as 120%.
Human food is under much stricter regulations on what goes into the food than dog food is. The rate of error is therefore much higher in dog food. This is why AAFCO set the standard for pet foods to show their “minimum” or “maximum” value as opposed to human food that tries to show an exact number.
Unfortunately, these percentages are based on total weight, including the water content. To accurately find out how much of a component is in each food, a little math is required to remove the moisture content. This puts wet, moist, and dry dog food on a level playing field as well as you are removing the moisture that can skew the numbers significantly.
To “remove” the moisture from your dog’s food to get the dry components, you need to remove the moisture content percentage from the whole.
Whole = 100%
Moisture content = x
100 – x = Total Dry Ingredients (TDI)
So in food with 20% moisture, 80% of the dog food’s weight is from dry components.
You can then find out how much of each component is actually in your dog’s food by simply dividing the component by the total dry components and multiply by 100.
Fat / TDI x 100 = % of the dry components that are fat.
Looking at a wet and dry version of a popular dog food in West Palm Beach would show that the dry food has 26% of protein whereas the wet food shows a mere 9%. The moisture content in the dry food is 10% and 80% in the wet food.
The dry food is calculated before:
100 – 10 = 90
26 / 90 x 100 = 28.89% protein
The wet food is calculated here:
100 – 80 = 20
9 / 20 x 100 = 45.00% protein
As you can see, by taking the guaranteed analysis’ base numbers it would appear that there is significantly more protein in the dry food. After removing the moisture, it shows that the wet food is significantly higher in protein than the dry food. This is why it is important to know your labels and how to really read them. But if you’re not a math whiz, visit your local West Palm Beach dog food retailer and ask for assistance in choosing a food right for your pet!
