My Moose monster is currently on a diet of Purina One: Healthy Weight Formula in hopes of controlling his ever-expanding girth. I’m curious to see how his food falls on the dog food grading scale.
Start with a score of 100. Easy enough.
Here are the ingredients: Turkey, brewers rice, poultry by-product meal, corn gluten meal, corn bran, whole grain corn, whole grain wheat, oat meal, non-fat yogurt, animal fat, animal digest, dicalcium phosphate, calcium carbonate, salt, potassium chloride, l-lysine monohydrochloride, choline chloride, zinc sulfate, Vitamin E supplement, ferrous sulfate, manganese sulfate, niacin, Vitamin A supplement, calcium pantothenate, thiamine mononitrate, copper sulfate, riboflavin supplement, Vitamin B-12 supplement, pyridoxine hydrochloride, garlic oil, folic acid, Vitamin D-3 supplement, calcium iodate, biotin, menadione sodium bisulfate complex, sodium selenate.
Yikes, I don’t even know what half these long words are. But I’ll be brave and try to score it anyway.
- For every listing of “by-product”, subtract 10 points for being sketchy! Okay, that’s -10 for “poultry by-product meal”.
- For every non-specific animal source (“meat” or “poultry”, meat, meal or fat) reference, subtract 10 points for being sketchy! Eeek, another -10 for that “poultry by-product meal”. And I’m not quite sure what “animal digest” is, so I’m going to take -10 for that.
- If the same grain ingredient is used 2 or more times in the first five ingredients (i.e. “ground brown rice”, “brewer’s rice”, “rice flour” are all the same grain), subtract 5 points. Okay, variations on corn are #4 and #5 so it’s -5 for that one!
- If the protein sources are not meat meal and there are less than 2 meats in the top 3 ingredients, subtract 3 points. Hmmm, not sure on this one.
- If it contains ground corn or whole grain corn, subtract 3 points. Doh! Another -3 for the corn.
- If corn is listed in the top 5 ingredients, subtract 2 more points. Ooh, bad corn. -2
- If the food contains any animal fat other than fish oil, subtract 2 points. Since it lists “animal fat” I’m taking -2 on this.
- If it contains wheat (unless you know that your dog isn’t allergic to wheat), subtract 2 points. My dogs aren’t allergic to wheat, so I’m NOT taking off for this.
- If it contains salt, subtract 1 point. -1 for the salt.
So the grand total so far is… -43 points. 100 minus 43 is 57. So far, Purina One: Healthy Weight Formula fails. But we may be saved by the Extra Credit!!
- If the food contains vegetables (NOT corn or other grains), add 3 points. Uh, is garlic a vegetable? Probably not, so I won’t count it.
- If the food contains oats or oatmeal, add 1 point. Yay! +1
- If it contains glucosamine and chondroitin, add 1 point. Yay! +1
Okay. The final result? By this method, Purina One: Healthy Weight Formula scores a whopping 59. I knew it wasn’t going to go well when I was typing out all the ingredients and couldn’t spell most of them. I’m going to look at some other dog foods over the next few weeks and see how they rate… it may be time for a switch!