Are chicken & beef by-products and broth okay in wet dog food?

According to Purina, their chicken by product meal is made "of chicken that has been ground and cooked, reducing the fat content to create a protein-rich ingredient." I feed my dog Purina ProPlan and regularly recommend it to others. It is one of the few foods he can eat without issue. While grains have been implicated in allergies, not all dogs who eat grains in food develop allergies. If your dog does well with what you are feeding, there is no need to change it or be concerned. There is no one "best" food. Feed what your dog will eat, does well on and is easy for you to buy.

Chicken meal is ground up chicken meat that is dried and rendered. Chicken by-product is the parts of the chicken that remain after the meat is removed, such as the lungs, liver, spleen, and kidneys. These are perfectly healthy to feed to your pet. I hope this helps!

Again, there is no known problem with these ingredients. The stigma about byproducts is especially annoying, because byproducts like liver, kidney and other organs have great nutritional value compared with meat. The reason behind the stigma is not easy to understand. It really has to do with a series of non- professionals speculating on unsupported theories and then spreading the information as if it's truth. The same happens with people...just look at all the fad diets that come and go. While there may be some shred of evidence that these ingredients may have potential to cause harm, there is not nearly enough for a professional to say that they are bad and other ingredients are good. You can see that the pet food industry has responded to the unsupported claims of grains, natural ingredients, byproducts and even raw food, but please don't take that as confirmation that these ingredients are bad or good. It's nothing more than sales strategy and responding to consumer demands. This is a huge topic that I cannot begin to cover here, so I'll give you a couple links to some helpful articles: https://www.petcoach.co/article/what-to-look-for-when-choosing-your-pet-s-food https://www2.vet.cornell.edu/news/20130205/what-pet-food-should-i-feed

By product meal contains the clean parts of the animal that are not rendered, meaning the tissues that people don't eat. This can include scraps of muscle as well as organ meats and bones. It is a nutritious source of protein and vitamins/minerals. It is also a good way to use all parts of the slaughtered animal so there is less waste.

Pedigree is pretty much junk food, as long as the label marks the animal the meat or fat comes from it's fine, if it is not specify it is a good reason to be suspicious. here are a few high quality foods: Orijen, Acana, Evolve and Taste of the wild.

Basically, there is proponent of people in the media and in the "natural" food sector that would like to make everyone believe that grains are the devil and that dogs are wolves. This is, in fact, incorrect. Wheat and soy, grains, contain valuable nutrients including proteins that dogs can readily digest and utilize appropriately. While it is true that there are dogs that get GI upset from consumption of these, the same can be said about beef, chicken, and any other meat protein. Rice, oats, and potatoes are acceptable in small quantities, but do contain starches which are complex sugars, and are a little more difficult to digest. In terms of by-products, this is usually referring to any part of the animal that is not the flesh of the beast. Usually this includes certain organs, bones, blood, etc. These products can be ground up and made into a byproduct - meal of sorts. Obviously, the actual meat is going to contain more appropriate nutrients but if a dog were left to it, they would be happy to eat any and all pieces of an animal. As for specific brands of food, Hill's is the brand that I typically recommend to all my clients and which I feed to my own dogs and cats. I consider it to be very high quality. I can't speak much about the other brand you've named unfortunately as I have little knowledge about it. Hope this helped though!

It is fine to use some of the chicken broth for flavoring on dog food. Just make sure there was no aggressive seasoning or excessive salt used. The best broth for dogs would be non seasoned or low salt broth. Also you would want to skim out the fat if there is a lot of it or let it set up in the fridge first so you can remove the larger fat layer. Giving cooked chicken is also no problem as a treat. Just make sure the majority of the diet is dog food as that is made balanced for dogs. I hope this helps and thank you for using Petco Pet Education Center, formerly Petcoach!