THE TRUTH ABOUT "MEAT MEAL"

When you're walking down the pet food aisle trying to decide what food to buy for your pup, you're facing a barrage of marketing tactics that companies use to influence your perception of their product.

Looking at the packaging you'll see images of happy dogs. You'll see vibrant, enticing images of fresh beef, poultry or seafood. You'll see phrases like "Made with REAL BEEF!" and "Complete & Balanced Nutrition".

But when you turn the bag or can around and look at the ingredients list, what do you see?

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WHAT IS MEAT MEAL?

Many processed commercial dog foods have meat meal, poultry meal, or fish meal as a main source of protein. It may contain the words beef, poultry, or fish...but is that what it really is? Well, sort of...

Government pet food regulations allow for numerous loopholes and wiggle room for companies when marketing their product. Meat meal may come from a cow...chicken meal may come from a chicken...but the company doesn't have to tell you what part of the cow or chicken that meal was made from.

Any ingredient listed as "meal" is a rendered product. So you may be asking...

What Is A Rendered Product?

According to the USDA, rendering is defined as:

“A process of using high temperature and pressure to convert whole animal and poultry carcasses or their by-products with no or very low value to safe, nutritional, and economically valuable products. It is a combination of mixing, cooking, pressurizing, fat melting, water evaporation, microbial and enzyme inactivation.“

Raw material is ground, cooked, then pressed to remove fat. The resulting product is then ground again and becomes "meal".

Waste Advantage Magazine, a rendering industry publication, states:

“The majority of the waste material that is processed in rendering comes from slaughterhouses and can include fatty tissue, bones and other processing offal. Offal is the parts of an animal that are not fit for human consumption, such as organs, blood and feathers. Almost 30 percent of an animal’s live weight ends up as offal, which would be expensive to dispose of and wasted if not for the rendering process.“

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IS MEAT MEAL GOOD OR BAD FOR MY DOG?

Meal, in and of itself, isn't necessarily a horrible thing. When meal is made from the human-grade parts of the animal (think ribeye steak or boneless, skinless chicken breast) it is just a concentrated form of protein. The problem is, most commercial pet foods use low quality meals made from anything and everything but the human-grade parts of the animal.

If you see ingredients like "chicken by-product meal" or if you see ingredients that hide the name of the source animal (meat meal as opposed to beef meal) you can be certain that the meal used is low quality.

You may be asking yourself, "What are my options?"

Whether the meal used to make a dog food is high quality or low quality, it will never be a comparable replacement for human-grade, whole meats. When looking at ingredient lists, look for foods that contain real beef, poultry or seafood as the main source of protein.

Choose REAL, RAW Beef

And Save Up To 25%

Choose REAL, RAW Beef And Save Up To 25%