We know you love your dog and you want to make sure that they are eating healthy and nutritious food.  With so many brands on the market it can be hard to figure out what the right choice is. The first step is to look at the ingredient panel of your dog’s current food and to know how to identify what are good ingredients and which ones you should stay away from. The chart below shows some of the most common ingredients that you want to watch out for. Additionally, you can see how commercial brands often use these cheap fillers in place of quality nutritious ingredients.

Once you know how to read the back of the food bag, you can decide which food is right for your pup and your wallet. Dog food that is made up primarily of cheap fillers, provide only modest  nutrition per cup, so you will need to feed your dog a lot more. Looking at the same four popular dog food brands, we can see the difference in how much, on average, that you would feed a 50 lb dog. So, it might actually save you money to buy a slightly more expensive bag of food.

Another great tool for picking dog food is to check out sites that provide nutritional analysis and information on hundreds of brands of dog food. Sites such as dogfoodadvisor.com rank food on a scale of 1-5 stars, can help you choose food and keep you up to date on recalls!