Keeping our pets as healthy as possible is the goal of all pet owners. The first step in achieving that goal is to feed them properly.
It can be hard to decide what food to give them with all the options that are on the market today.
Here are some ingredients you will want to avoid when choosing a food for your cat or dog.
Ingredients to Avoid in Cat Food
Chemical preservatives such as ethoxyquin, BHA and BHT are used to ensure that cat food lasts a long time, but they are suspected to be risky as they may cause cancer.
More and more manufacturers of pet food are staying away from these ingredients and turning to preservatives that are more natural such as Vitamin E and Vitamin C.
Meat by products is another ingredient you want to avoid. Meat by products can include such parts of the slaughtered animal as intestines, stomachs, blood, bone, livers, brains, kidneys, spleens and the lungs.
Meat by products is a far more inferior form of protein and you can never be sure exactly what you are getting. You should also stay away from any cat food that contains meat by product meal as well.
Ingredients to Avoid in Dog Food
There are a number of additives that should be avoided when you are searching for a quality food to feed your dog. Glyceryl Monostearate is one of them.
It is used as a preservative and is often used in medicines, plastic products, cosmetics and is widely used in the food industry. Phosphoric Acid is harmless and is often used in dog food of poor quality. It is used as a flavoring, most notably in Coca Cola.
Binders that should be avoided in dog food are wheat gluten and corn gluten. They add no nutritional value and its use is to merely bind the food together. Sources of carbohydrates that should be avoided are brewers rice as most of the nutritional content is missing.
It is an ingredient that is cheaper than using whole grain rice and is not an ingredient of high quality. Other ingredients to stay away from are cereal food fines, feeding oat meal, soy flour and potato product.
If it is nearly impossible for you to pronounce you can be sure that it can’t be healthy for your dog. Try to feed your animals food that contains mostly natural ingredients and avoid cheap foods that have little or no nutritional value.
