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Ingredients

When we start looking at the different ingredients that you can find on a dog food, cat food bag.

You’re can have animal protein sources, plant protein sources, amino acids. They will just be listed. And part of it is some of things you have probably learned in this class. I would hope, at least, you could identify what an animal protein source is which would be meat and bone meals, poultry by-product meals, those kinds of things. A plant protein source, soybean meal. An amino acid that’s often put in animal feeds, synthetic D-L-methionine, L-lysine. Those are the two most commonly found ones that you’d put in an animal product.

Then, you can have carbohydrate sources such as your starches, your sugars and your fiber. And they’ve actually been finding more often with research they’ve been doing that actually the fiber content is actually very important for cats and dogs. And actually for other animals too because what it's providing is a source of fermentable fibers which actually provides nutrition for the intestinal enterocytes or those cells you find on the inside of the intestine. They have real high turnover. They’ve got to be healthy. And so this fermentable fiber that you’ll sometimes find in your rice bran, some other sources, will actually help feed those cells and keep the animal healthier.

Then, you’ve got your fat sources which can be either animal fats, vegetable fats or a combination of the two. Sometimes they’ll just say that they are combined, animal and vegetable fat is what they’ll say. Obviously, they’re put in there for energy sources. Cats have a much higher energy needs, so usually a cat food will have higher fat in it.

Then, there are also going to be vitamin-mineral sources. And there are supplements. Antioxidants will sometimes be a supplement. And you’ve probably heard about glucosamine-chondroitin. What’s it generally being used for in feeding animals? Joints, joint health, that kind of thing.

The feed ingredients are actually defined. I can’t just go out and say this is what corn gluten meal means to me, so what does it mean to you? There’s actual definition. There’s the industry Red Book. You have a listing of all the feed ingredients that you could put in various animal feeds. And they will actually define them and what they are. If there’s ever a question, everybody goes back to that and that gives us what we would need to work off of. The complete listing is put out by the Association of American Feed Control Officials or AAFCO. One thing to be aware of, and you probably know this from the things you’ve studied in here and learned in here, is that quality will vary even among ingredients themselves. Just because it says it’s there, it doesn’t really tell you anything about the quality or how good it is. There’s also a thing called split listing of similar ingredients and it may lead to some confusion. Remember, I said how ingredients are listed in order of descending weight. What if I have in a certain food, you know we’re going on down the line, all of a sudden we’ll hit ground wheat, then I go a little but farther down then they’ll list wheat, then they’ll list wheat bran. Now, this can be listed separately because they’re actually different ingredients according to definition. But, are they all the same? They’re from the same basic source, they’re all wheat and that’s what they mean by split listings. What we’ll end up with is that wheat itself, which is what all these products come from, is actually higher up on the list than one would think about. That’s what we mean by split listing. This is actually interesting for any kind of food you’re going to be looking at. Any kind of horse, cattle, chicken, it’s just something to think about if you have lists at all to look at. If they do split them like this, well, we’re looking more at this as actually what is the actuality of the product in the food itself. That’s what a split listing is.

What we’re going to do is go through these ingredients and I want you to give me what their primary use is in a diet, whether it be protein, carbohydrate, vitamin, mineral, fat. Meat and bone meal is what? Protein. Chicken meal? Protein. Copper oxide? Mineral. Just one thing to note about copper oxide, it is not available to animals or humans and they’ve just found this out a few years ago. This is just for your general information, if you find a food supplement and/or pet food that has copper oxide in it, I wouldn’t buy it because the copper is not available. They’ve been shown in tests to be unavailable to the animal. And the reason they’ve used it in the past, is it was very cheap. You’re not really getting a very good product if that shows up. Soy flour? It’s a protein source, plant protein source. Corn gluten meal? It’s actually a plant protein source because what it is, if you see the corn in there you might think it’s a carbohydrate source, but it really isn’t because what you’ve done, this is a manufactured product and most of the carbohydrates have been taken out already through the processing of the corn to get both the oil out and the sugars out to make corn starch and this is the product that’s left. They use it as a protein source. It’s usually about 42-46% protein. Rice bran? It’s a carbohydrate because it’s a fiber. Mixed tocopherols? Vitamin. Vitamin E. What’s vitamin E do? Skin and coat, yes. It’s very good for that, but it has a function actually inside the cells of the animal. Antioxidant. Yes, that’s very important. And actually as people have become a little bit more leery on the synthetic antioxidants like BHT and ethoxyquin, manufacturers have gone to putting many more mixed tocopherols in because they’re antioxidants, they’re natural. The only problem is they tend to break down faster than the synthetic products do, so your shelf life really isn’t as long. Dehydrated potatoes? Carbohydrate. Tallow? Fat. Canola oil? Which one's the plant and which ones the animal? Tallow is the animal. Canola is the vegetable or plant. L-lysine? That’s the amino acid. Dicalcium phosphate? Mineral source. Pyridoxine hydrochloride? Pyridoxine is vitamin B-6, so it’s a B vitamin. That’s just how they manufacturer the synthetic part of the vitamin, so it becomes a hydrochloride. Menadione sodium bisulfite? And you’ll see this, I mean if you look at cat and dog food bags, you’ll see that, that it is there. Vitamin K. Calcium iodate? Iodine, don’t let the calcium part fool you. Copper proteinate? What it is is actually it’s a chelate of copper. It’s actually a mineral source, but what you’ve done is chelated the copper ion to a different source, this proteinate, and it is actually absorbed by the animal better. It’s become quite a process of trying to get these trace minerals into animals. Ferrous sulfate? That’s the iron source. Corn? That’s energy. Ground rice? That’s energy. A poultry by-product meal? That’s a protein. And BHT? That’s an antioxidant. I talked about it. That's a synthetic. You’ll see that in lots of food products and even pet products, but like I said, I would make a wager that a lot of the pet products don’t have it anymore.

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