[CarolineS]

Rommel's Mom,

What I think is that this food has more grain than meat. Meat may well be first in the list of ingredients but ground rice, rice flour and rice bran are all part of the same thing, rice! If you were to add up the different weights of all these rice parts, I guarantee you would come up with more rice than meat (that is if they told you what the actual weights were, but they don't because they don't want you to catch on). For example, if the food is 35% meat, 30% ground rice, 20% rice flour and 10% rice bran, this gives you 35% meat and 60% rice. This is called ingredient splitting and companies do this to fool you into thinking there is more meat in the product than grain.

I don't know which food this is, but it doesn't sound like a premium food. If this is supposed to be a maintenance food, you could do better.

Oops, I missed your small print. :o It's a large breed puppy food. I think with a food with this much grain, you'd need to feed a lot of it so the puppy got the right amount of protein. Protein from grain isn't very easily assimilated so you need to feed more. When you feed more, you end up feeding more calories running the risk of obesity (pups should be lean, not fat) and feeding more of the supplements in the food, too, like calcium, phophorus, vitamins and mineral. This type of overnutrition can lead to things like pano and more seriously, joint problems.