Friday, August 28, 2009

Hill's Science Diet Canine Sensitive Stomach

Why I would never feed this food.
The first ingredient is brewers rice which is a low quality grain that is a by-product of the alcohol industry for which the AAFCO definition is “the dried extracted residue of rice resulting from the manufacture of wort (liquid portion of malted grain) or beer and may contain pulverized dried spent hops in an amount not to exceed 3 percent. Yum - I would not give that to a sewer rat.
The second ingredient is Corn gluten meal, another low quality ingredient. Corn is a problematic grain that is difficult for dogs to digest and thought to be the cause of a great many allergy and yeast infection problems. The AAFCO definition of corn gluten meal is "the dried residue from corn after the removal of the larger part of the starch and germ, and the separation of the bran by the process employed in the wet milling manufacture of corn starch or syrup, or by enzymatic treatment of the endosperm". In other words that which remains after all the nutrition have been removed. Corn appears a second time as the fourth ingredient - humm a filler perhaps.
Next in the list is by-products. These are usually products that are of such low quality as to be rejected for use in the human food chain, or else are those parts that have so little value that they cannot be used elsewhere in either the human or pet food industries. The AAFCO definition of chicken by-product meal is “a meal consisting of the ground, rendered, clean parts of the carcass of slaughtered chicken, such as necks, feet, undeveloped eggs and intestines, exclusive of feathers, except in such amounts as might occur unavoidable in good processing practice.” Animal fat is a further low quality ingredient and is impossible to determine the source. Unidentified ingredients are usually very low quality. AAFCO define this as "obtained from the tissues of mammals and/or poultry in the commercial processes of rendering or extracting. It consists predominantly of glyceride esters of fatty acids and contains no additions of free fatty acids. If an antioxidant is used, the common name or names must be indicated, followed by the words "used as a preservative". Chicken digest is a further low quality ingredient of which AAFCO define as "material which results from chemical and/or enzymatic hydrolysis of clean and undecomposed chicken tissue". Oh my. Why would you feed that to your pet?
Fish meal, 9Th on the ingredient list. This is so low to make up an appreciable portion of the food. The manufacturer does not claim to use ethoxyquin-free sources (ethoxyquin is a chemical preservative commonly added to fish destined for meal, and is believed to be carcinogenic). Watch for those words in other pet food because they do use it.
OK, I have listed some of the ingredients in Science Diet Sensitive Stomach. So is it worth feeding your pet that? I think not. Try some really great food instead. Life's Abundance www.pipschoice.com

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