Pet Food Labels — Part 3 of 3
Welcome to the third in a series of articles that hopefully clear up some of the confusion around pet food labels. This particular article focuses on feeding instructions and descriptive terms.
Feeding Instructions:
When we look at the nutrition label on food for humans, it doesn’t tell us how much to consume (although let’s be honest, maybe it should). It does tell us the serving size, as well as how many servings are in a container, and then we’re supposed to use our best judgment to determine how much to eat.
With pet food, it’s a little different. Pet food labels have to tell you how much food to feed (in terms of weight) for each pound of your pet, also taking into account what life stage your pet is in.
(If we did that for humans, the label would tell you how many ounces or grams of a particular food you should eat based on your current weight and age.)
If a pet food is for all life stages, it should have instructions for how much to feed at the various life stages (gestation/lactation, growth, maintenance).
There’s a bit of wiggle room here — these instructions are actually “guidelines”, meaning you have to know your pet and adjust as needed. Also, for pet foods that are prescription only, they don’t have to list feeding instructions — they can just put “use only as directed by your veterinarian” and leave it at that.
Descriptive Terms:
As with human food, pet foods can be labeled as “low calorie”, “less calorie”, “low fat”, and “less fat”. Each one of these has a different meaning.
“Low/Light/Lite calorie”: For this to be on a label, the food has to meet two standards. First, it has to be significantly lower in calories in comparison to a “standard” food. Second, it has to have feeding directions that, if followed, would reduce your pet’s caloric intake.
“Less/Reduced calorie”: When you see this on a label, the label must also feature a comparison product, so you can see that there are fewer calories in this version. The label should also have a percent reduction in calories (i.e. 25% less calories) as well as applicable feeding instructions. However, it doesn’t have the calorie reduction you’d see in the low/light/lite calorie food.
“Lean/Low Fat”: This descriptor means that, well, you have less fat, and you have to have a maximum and minimum guaranteed percentage of crude fat.
“Less/Reduced Fat”: Similar to the “less/reduced calorie” descriptor, a product with this label has to have a comparison product and its fat content, and must have the maximum crude fat percentage as well.
And there you have it! Some of the more confusing aspects of pet food labelling, hopefully made a trifle clearer for you.
If you missed the first two in the series, here are their links.
