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Originally Posted by Noreen612  Thank you for all the responses! It really does feel like such a crapshoot, raw vs not raw kibble versus no kibble and then of course the various varieties within kibble. Such trial and error!! |
The best thing to do is to feed a nutritionally balanced food that your dog likes and does well on. According to their website, Fromm foods are designed to meet AAFCO guidelines, which means they meet the minimum requirements for nutritionally balanced foods for healthy dogs. I think that some of their recipes are given names that are meant to be appealing to the appetites of the dog's human owners, which is not a relevant consideration at all (and personally turns me off), so I would ignore that and try to keep it simple. Fromm seems to have a huge diversity of food, so there's a lot to choose from, but I'd stick to simple, traditional ingredients (protein and carbohydrate sources) that other dogs have done well on in the past.
A couple of things that make me a little uneasy about Fromm is that the ingredients for their dog foods listed on their website (
www.frommfamily.com) are incomplete. They list "vitamins and minerals," but don't state specifically which ones they add to their food, and a lot is left off when you click on their "typical analysis" link. (See
https://frommfamily.com/products/dog...eed-adult-gold for an example.) If you check the ingredient lists on many other brands of dog foods, they list each and every vitamin and mineral that is added. I trust Fromm to follow AAFCO guidelines because they state that they do on their website, but when you look at the fine print, it becomes a matter of faith.
The second thing that makes me uneasy is what they write on their FAQ page in response to the question: "I heard Fromm is good for pets with allergies– why?" Their answer is basically that their foods are made from so many different ingredients that if your dog is actually allergic to a specific ingredient and their dog food contains that ingredient, it is diluted out by the other ingredients and doesn't matter. Here's the quote (from the web page
https://frommfamily.com/about/questi...for-allergies/ ):
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By using a combination of ingredients, Fromm is able to avoid being solely dependent on any single ingredient. This may provide an advantage to an animal that has a dietary intolerance (not a true dietary allergy) to any one ingredient. The “offending” ingredient will still be present in the diet, but at a level that the animal's system can tolerate.
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So it's a kind of bait and switch. The question is about food allergies, but their reply is about dietary intolerance, and they say it doesn't matter. I'm not an expert in food allergies vs. dietary intolerances, but that answer makes me uneasy.
But if you have a healthy dog with no food allergies or intolerances, it's probably a good food
.