Pet Food Express
Supplementing with K9-Rx for uncompromising Pet Food Express—Amidst all the confusion is K9-Rx, the only way to ensure a daily delivery of the highest quality protein, amino acids, essential vitamins, minerals and other nutrients that may be deficient from, or could enhance your dogs health.
To ensure your pet is always in top form, feed a healthy, quality food with the right levels of nutrients to build and maintain a healthy immune system, skin, and haircoat. Supplement with K9Rx when necessary according to your pet's health, your pet's age/life stage, and any life events (such as pregnancy) that may require a boost/change in nutrition. As always, consult your veterinarian if you have questions about supplements, and whether they would be appropriate and beneficial for your pet.
TIt is often said that “Pets use the nutrients in the food, not the ingredients.” This is quite true, but the ingredients provide the nutrients, so these are important as well. Having a basic understanding of pet nutrition and the nutrients provided by various ingredients will help you make an educated decision on which diet is best for your pet. Don’t forget, though, that a diet that has a perfect label or apparently perfect nutritional content may not necessarily work for you pet. Don’t despair, a little trial and error will help you find the best food for your pet.
The guaranteed analysis is a required part of the Pet Food Express package. This must list the protein, fat, fiber and moisture content in the food. It is important to know these values, but other important nutrients don’t have to be listed. These include ash, calcium, phosphorus, and fatty acids. When examining a Pet Food Express package, notice how many nutrients are guaranteed. A diet that has many guaranteed nutrients, above and beyond the four required, is a higher quality, more consistent product.
For example, ABC Kibble may have a guarantee of the following: 21% protein minimum, 9% fat minimum, 4% fiber maximum and 10% moisture maximum. As you can see, this doesn’t tell you a whole lot about the food inside the bag. The protein content of a food is expressed as a minimum value. This means that the food in this bag has at least 21% protein. Most foods stay relatively close to their minimum expressed on the package. So, it is unlikely the ABC Kibble has 30% protein, but probably has 21-22%. Fat is also expressed as a minimum, while fiber and moisture are expressed as maximums.
Protein is important for the overall health of your pet. Proteins are broken down into amino acids during digestion. The individual amino acids have unique and essential roles within the body. Arginine, leucine, and phenylalanine are a few examples of amino acids that are essential for dogs and cats. Taurine is an amino acid that is essential for cats, but must be supplemented, as most protein sources don’t contain high enough amounts to meet cats’ needs. Without taurine, cats can develop blindness and heart failure. This is one of the primary reasons that cats should eat cat food and not dog food, as many dog foods do not have added taurine.
Meat proteins provide a more ideal amino acid profile than do grain proteins, such as soybean meal or corn gluten meal. However, vegetable protein sources are sometimes used to supplement meat proteins because of their low ash content, especially when the meat protein is high in ash.
Look at the label for a dry protein source, or a meal. Fresh meats provide less than 20% protein to a dry diet because of the high moisture content. So, fresh meats are great because they are low in ash and improve the taste of the food, but need to be supported by a dry protein source. Chicken by-product meal is the lowest ash meat protein source available. It is made from the internal organs of chickens as well as a small amount of meat and bone. Chicken meal is higher in ash, being made from rendered chicken necks and backs, including the bones. Lamb meal is higher in ash than chicken meal, as the bone content is higher. Finally, meat meal (or meat and bone meal) is the highest ash ingredient, and considered to be a poor quality ingredient.
Fat is another critical nutrient for a pet’s overall health. Most fat sources provide high levels of omega-6 fatty acids. Omega-6 fatty acids are essential nutrients for maintaining healthy skin. However, high levels of omega-6 fatty acids can be detrimental to the health of your pet, when they are not balanced with omega-3 fatty acids. Look for sources of omega-3 fatty acids, such as fish oil, fishmeal, and flaxseed. When omega-6 fatty acids are not balanced with omega-3’s, they promote inflammation within the skin, joints, and gastrointestinal tract.
Not all fiber is a “filler” as many people say, but carefully selected fiber sources are vital for the health of the gastrointestinal system. Some sources of fiber, such as beet pulp and chicory root, actually enhance the health of the GI tract by providing energy to the cells of the colon and the “good” bacteria that reside throughout the GI tract. These ingredients are often referred to as “prebiotics”.Moisture is not really a nutrient of importance to your pet, but simply a factor within the food. The only time moisture is of real concern is if it is too high in a dry Pet Food Express. Elevated moisture levels may allow mold to grow within a bag of food, obviously not a desirable situation. No Pet Food Express can be 100% dry matter. The moisture value is used to calculate the dry matter content of nutrients within a food. This way, we are able to compare the total nutrient content of various foods on an equal basis, called the dry matter basis. For example, if a food contains 8.5% moisture and 20% protein on an as-fed basis, then this same food contains 21.9% protein on a dry matter basis. You can use dry matter values to compare foods with differing moisture content, such as a dry food versus a wet food.
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