![]() ![]() Our Country Hunter range is grain and gluten free and offers a choice of complete and balanced single protein options, such as our Wild Venison or Duck Nuggets. Gluten, grain or certain protein allergies can also be culprits behind dogs’ digestive issues, so we’ve created options that can cater for these more specific needs. How do Allergies Affect the Diet of a dog with a Sensitive Stomach? If you are looking for sensitive stomach dog food, the limited ingredients in our Country Hunter range can help in the process of identifying particular intolerances. For more information about the benefits of raw feeding, you can watch our in-house veterinary expert Mel here. Our quality, real food uses only natural ingredients, with none of the added sugar or fillers or commonly found in highly processed dog foods. Raw, natural food is thought to be easier to digest, making it an option for sensitive stomach dog food. Take a look if you haven’t already.Is Raw the Best Dog Food for Sensitive Stomachs and Gas? The petMD MyBowl tool is a good source of information about which cat food ingredients are highly digestible and which should be avoided. Including some fiber (e.g., in the form of whole grains) is a perfectly reasonably way to mimic the role that a mouse’s fur or the seeds that it just ate have as they pass through a cat’s digestive tract. That said, even the best cat food should not be 100% digestible (mice aren’t 100% digestible, after all). Unlike dogs, cats are obligate carnivores, which means that they require relatively more protein, and that digestibility is especially important for them. If you’ve read both the canine and feline versions of this post, you may have noticed the numbers that I’ve chosen to use for the protein and digestibility percentages in my calculations are higher for cats in comparison to dogs. Highly-digestible, quality ingredients do cost more, so don’t be tempted by deals that appear too good to be true - because they probably are. What’s the cost? While it’s true that manufacturers can slap a high price on a low quality food, the opposite does not hold.The top of the list should be dominated by ingredients that sound like something you might find in your kitchen. In general, high quality ingredients are more digestible than those of low quality. This is particularly true if the stool is soft or contains a lot of mucus. If she produces large amounts of feces, her current diet may not be all that digestible. Unfortunately, digestibility does not have to be reported on cat food labels, but there are ways for owners to determine, at least in part, whether or not a particular diet is highly digestible. You can see that even though the two labels say that each food contains 30% protein, Food A actually provides more usable protein than Food B. Food B: 50 grams of food x 0.3 x 0.85 = 12.75 grams of protein is absorbed.Food A: 50 grams of food x 0.3 x 0.95 = 14.25 grams of protein is absorbed.If a cat eats 50 grams of each food, then: Cat Food B contains 30 percent crude protein (according to its guaranteed analysis), and the protein is 85% digestible. ![]() Cat Food A contains 30 percent crude protein (according to its guaranteed analysis), and the protein is 95% digestible.You might be thinking, "So what?" So … let’s look at two hypothetical cat foods: If a cat were to eat 20 grams of protein and excrete 1 gram in her feces, the proteins in the diet were 95% digestible. What about the digestibility of individual nutrient categories? Take protein for example. (We’re ignoring water for the sake of simplicity, which is fine for our purposes as long as we don’t try to compare a dry and a canned food. In other words, the cat absorbed 92% of what was included in the food and got rid of 8% as waste. Therefore, we can say that the food in this example is 92% digestible. This means that she’s absorbing 46 grams of the food into her body. Let’s say a cat eats 50 grams of food per day and produces 4 grams of poop per day. Merriam-Webster defines "digestibility” as "the percentage of a foodstuff taken into the digestive tract that is absorbed into the body." An easy way to wrap your mind around this is to employ a little bit of arithmetic (I apologize to any mathophobes out there). The information in the two posts is similar but not identical, so if you’re interested in the well-being of dogs and cats, take a look at them both. In fact, I think it is so important that I’m going to address it on both the canine and feline Nutrition Nuggets pages on the same day. Today I’m going to talk about an important pet food characteristic - digestibility.
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