[Nancy1999]

Originally Posted by Britster

I also want to add that the words "grain-free" are beginning to just be yet another gimmick in marketing. I saw a food recently at Petsmart (I think it was Nature's Recipe) that says GRAIN-FREE real big on the big, and it's filled with potatoes and lack of meat content too. I don't necessarily believe that potatoes, etc, are better than barley, rice, etc. It's just a different type of binding agent that is necessary to form kibble.

I'm definitely not all for one way or the other. I know certain dogs do better on certain formulas better than others. Some can tolerate grains, some can't. Grains scare me mainly because most recalls involving dog food involve grains, so I'd rather just eliminate the problem.

But I never focus on just reading 'grain-free' on a package, or 'meat filled' or ANY of those lines they use. I like to first, look at the ingredient list, then I like to research WHERE the food is coming from. Different facilities have different standards and there's only a select few that I trust. Sometimes a food can LOOK great on the ingredient list but then you find out that's it's made somewhere terrible, or there was tons of recalls, or whatever.

Same with protein... I don't think it's fair, as I've seen some people do, to try feeding a food that has, say, 35% protein in it. And the dog didn't do well on it. So now they go on to post like "high protein did not work for my dog!!" when they only tried ONE higher-ish protein food and it very well could have been a specific ingredient in the food and NOT simply the protein content on the guaranteed analysis. Two foods that both have 35% protein can be vastly different. I don't think it's fair to write off a high protein food for your dog because he failed on one. So food is definitely not a black or white issue for me.

I so agree with this, I mean some dogs are allergic to grains, so you'd want to feed grain free, but I don't think there is any evidence out yet to suggest that this is best for all dogs.