| Website | Nutro |
| Available from | Pet Circle |
Nutro seems to be a popular brand in the pet stores. The company has been around for a while in the US and some of their better products are imported to Australia.
This review is for Nutro Natural Choice Adult Dog Wholesome Essentials, focusing on the Chicken & Rice recipe. Let’s take a look…
The top ingredient is chicken which sounds good, but don’t be fooled. Once cooked this will reduce to a mere third of it’s weight, making rice and rice flour the prominent ingredients. The protein level of 22% makes this one of the lowest protein foods on the market, and I estimate the carbs to be 47% which makes it one of the highest carbohydrate foods on the market. That doesn’t strike me as a “natural” canine diet.
Beet pulp as the fourth ingredient is concerning. It’s a common ingredient in pet food, used to add fibre and artificially harden stools (lots of people gauge the quality of a food based on the firmness of stools). Beet pulp sucks up a great deal of moisture, inflating in size, consequentially making stools hard to pass through the colon. Often these problems remain hidden until the dog transitions to a diet without beet pulp. As far back as the 1980s it was found that saponin (found in beet pulp) causes gastrointestinal disorders and bloat.
One thing I’d like to see from Nutro is the inclusion of fruits and vegetables as a natural vitamin and fibre source. They don’t seem to do that. They do, however, include sunflower oil for lineolic acid (helps with skin and coat), and that’s a solid ingredient.
If you can, feed something else, but if you buy your food in the supermarket then this is better than others on offer.
Ingredients
Chicken, Ground Rice, Rice Flour, Dried Beet Pulp, Chicken Fat, Natural Flavours (Chicken), Sunflower Oil, Iodised Salt, Essential Minerals (including Potassium Chloride, Zinc Sulphate, Iron Sulphate, Copper Sulphate, Potassium Iodide, Selenium), Natural Antioxidants (including Mixed Tocopherols and Rosemary Extract), Choline Chloride, Taurine, Essential Vitamins (Including Vitamin E, Vitamin B5, Biotin, Vitamin A, Riboflavin, Vitamin B12, Thiamine, Niacin, Vitamin D3, Vitamin B6, Folic Acid), Vitamin C, Marigold Meal.
I fed both my cats and dog Nutro for decades with fantastic results but there have obviously been changes made as I don’t remember beet pulp or corn ever being an ingredient. I always fed the product out of America and don’t know if the Australian made food is different. Either way its disappointing Nutro
The dog food may not have corn in it but the cat food does. In the list of ingredients it says “Maize Gluten” so why does the cat food have corn and not the dog food? We used to feed this to our cats until they changed packaging and also messed with the ingredients, which made one of our cats sick. Every time he ate food from the new packaging some hours later he would start vomiting. I contacted the company and was told nothing new was added and nothing was taken away but the quantities in the ingredients may have been changed. I noticed they had changed the wording of corn to maize gluten and there was one other ingredient that I couldn’t match up to anything on the old packet I can’t remember what it was now. A little deceiving the way some of these ingredients are set out I think. And something in this new food certainly made my cat sick so that was it from then on we only use grain free, something this brand is not.