The final step in our holistic approach to creating an excellent quality of life for your King Charles is selecting the best meal plan that you can find.
To select the right plan, you need to understand how the labels are written.
High-quality meal plans will focus on a balance of skeletal-muscle development, enhanced immune system support, and aid with more efficient digestion.
This benefit occurs by eliminating unnecessary additives and fillers that offer little nutritional needs and may even lead to unhealthy side effects.
The primary benefits of good nutrition for your King Charles Spaniel:
- Strong bones and teeth
- Better muscle tone
- Support the skeletal-muscle system
- Bolstered immune system
- Aid with waste production and digestion
- Increased levels of energy
- Healthier coats
When you read the product labels, it should clearly state where the food originates from and eliminates misleading terms.
For example, food labels that include “meat meal” or uses a term like “Turkey Platter For Dogs With Salmon Flavor” are both unclear and misleading.
The reason manufacturers use those types of terms because they must comply with rigid standards by the FDA, but as we see, they aren’t the most accurate descriptions either.
Dog food is highly regulated, but that said, there are loopholes. For FDA approval, manufacturers must list the food in a way that describes the overall amount of an ingredient in the recipe. Still, if you’re unsure how to read it, it may seem like you’re selecting a healthy choice when in reality, it’s not.
If a product label claims that it’s “chicken,” then by FDA standards, it must include 95% of chicken in the recipe. However, if the food label claims something like a “salmon platter,” it is only required to have salmon more than 25% of the total recipe.
What’s more, if the food label says something like “dog food with turkey,” standards dictate the recipe only has to have 3% of that ingredient included. And what’s more, if a product description uses the term “dog food with chicken flavor,” the manufacturer is only required to include barely enough of that ingredient that is traceable. It doesn’t even have to be included as a primary ingredient!
