Nature's Recipe Adult Lamb Meal & Rice Recipe Dry Dog Food

The average dog food we reviewed has 39 total ingredients, with 1 controversial ingredient. This product has 3 total controversial ingredients and 2 of them are found in the first five ingredients. This is concerning because the first 5 ingredients make up most of the product.

Top 5 Ingredients

Dog food ingredients are listed in descending order of weight. So when looking at a dog food label, take a close look at the first 5 ingredients. They make up about 80% of the total weight.

• Lamb Meal
  Lamb is generally a healthy dog food ingredient. Meat meals are the result of cooking. Water is removed from meats to create a protein-rich meal powder. Meat meals contain about four times the protein meats do, so generally, they're a good source of nutrients.

• Barley
  Barley is a type of grass and a cereal grain. It is a source of calories and several nutrients, including protein, dietary fiber, B vitamins, niacin and various minerals. Barley provides carbs, energy, fiber and other healthy nutrients for dogs. Barley is generally a healthy dog food ingredient.

• Oatmeal
  Oats are a cereal grain and a source of carbs, protein, dietary fiber, several B vitamins and dietary minerals like manganese. They are a high-quality dog food ingredient that can potentially help with colon health. Oatmeal are oats that have been ground or cut.
  
  
• Brewer’s Rice
  Brewer's rice is the small, broken fragments of white rice that are left over when rice is milled. It's used in dog food since it's not considered aesthetically pleasing enough for human food. It's a cheaper alternative to whole rice or other grains, providing calories but only modest nutritional value. It is missing many of the nutrients contained in whole ground rice and brown rice. For these reasons, we do not consider this a high-quality dog food ingredient.
  
  
• Poultry Fat (Preserved with Mixed Tocopherols)
  While poultry fat is generally nutritious, this ingredient doesn't identify the species it comes from making it questionable and intransparent. This includes the potential that rancid, dead, dying, disabled or diseased meat sources could have been used. For that reason we do not consider this a high-quality ingredient. The other part of this ingredient is Mixed-Tocopherol, a natural preservative made from Vitamin E that helps keep food fresh.

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‍Controversial Ingredients

1. Brewer’s Rice
2. Brewer's Rice is basically white rice that has been broken into smaller pieces. It's a waste product of the milling process and considered a low quality ingredient because it's missing many of the nutrients contained in whole ground rice and brown rice.

1. Poultry Fat (Preserved with Mixed Tocopherols)
2. While poultry fat is generally healthy for dogs, this ingredient doesn't identify the species it comes from making it questionable and intransparent. This includes the potential that rancid, dead, dying, disabled or diseased fat sources could have been used. For these reasons, we do not consider this a high-quality ingredient.

1. Menadione Sodium Bisulfite Complex
2. A synthetic version of Vitamin K (known as Menadione) which is added due to the lack or loss of Vitamin K in the food processing. Menadione supplements are banned by the FDA because of their potential toxicity in human use and can be found as 10+ different names on a label. While low amounts have been found to be safe, the consistent repetitive nature of a dogs diet results in the long-term exposure that should be considered.

‍Country of Origin
Nature's Recipe is USA-made. We like dog foods made in the United States, Canada and Europe because of those regions’ high dog food safety regulations.

Meat & Fat Quality

Lamb Meal is the main meat in this food and Poultry Fat the added animal fat. The former is a named meat source, that’s good. The latter, however, leaves us guessing as to which poultry animal(s) it comes from, not good.

Artificial Preservatives

This product contains 0 controversial artificial preservatives - really great! Here’s a quick primer on this topic: It’s good to know that ‍not all artificial preservatives are bad. That’s because they serve an important purpose, which is to prevent food from spoiling. However, we consider 11 artificial preservatives controversial because of their potential link to cancer and other serious health conditions. Luckily, this dog food includes none of them.

Artificial Colors

No artificial colors, either. Excellent!

Artificial Flavors

Last but not least, we didn’t find artificial flavors in this dog food. No controversial artificial preservatives, colors or flavors - this product aced all three.