You will need to go back to Mordy's(nice to meet you) post and some of the points I don't know if I addressed because they could be more arguementive then informative so I saw know reason too and ran out of room to post.
nice meeting you too, scott.
i do not make points for the sake of being argumentative, but when it comes to feeding dogs, i do believe in the benefits of a natural diet rather than on claims made about a product that comes in a bag and is supposedly "complete and balanced".
i don't know what carb loading has to do with the digestibility of corn gluten (or other glutens for that matter), but i can tell you thatthere is no difference in digestibility of food items between working and non working dogs. all their digestive systems work the same, and they both have the short digestive tract of carnivorous animals and not the elaborate ones of ruminants like for example cattle. let's not get the digestibility properties of corn used as a source of carbohydrates mixed up with the incomplete protein corn gluten supplies. i'm not sure about your statement about "fat with a low melting point", as animal fats are the most natural ones for a carnivorous animal to eat.
the fact that healthwise active and innova evo have a high protein and fat content doesn't automatically make them "performance" formulas. notably evo is not meant to be a performance formula, but an alternative to grain filled food products out there.
Also Innova EVO break down is 42.2% Pro./22.153% fat without listing there carbs %.
you can get a detailed analysis of evo, including carbs, ash and other nutrients on their company website:
http://www.naturapet.com/display.php?d=nutrition-facts&pxsl=//product[@id='1246']
however, comparing it to standard pet foods is not quite possible, since it is completely grain free and derives almost all of its protein content from animal sources.
What AFFCO considers a complete diet is a joke. Come on now look at some of these so called dog foods in the supermarkets/Walmart/Fred Myers and then look at the peoples dogs being fed those cheap foods. Obese,dull coats ,big piles of poop(due to high grain %'s)short energy levels and those foods are helping to keep the Vets in business along with tained ingredients that AFFCO still allows. The minimums to sustain life is all thats in some of these bags of food. AFFCO should be imbarrassed of themselfs.
no disagreement on that from me, i'm just citing rules and numbers, however you have to keep in mind that the AAFCO is the governing body for the pet food industry and rules and regulations
could be changed if only the members of this governing body had any interest in it.
A diet of high grains are empty calories and have the same effect on some of us humans that are carb addicted and can't lose weight untill we increase our protien and fat levels while cutting out carbs and then only keeping small amounts of them in our diet later on.
i don't quite agree with that statement. the true problem is not that carbs are "evil" and make people fat. what makes people fat is overeating and not enough exercise. it is very well possible to lose weight and be healthy on the traditional recommendations of a 40-30-30 diet (distribution of calories from carbohydrate 40%, protein 30%, and fat 30%), as long as caloric intake is lower than the daily requirement. no matter which diet plan you follow, the only way to lose weight is to create a deficit in daily intake. when meat was not as cheap and abundant as it is today, carb foods were the main staple of people's diets and people worked much harder and were less sedentary than they are today.
however, for a dog, who is a carnivorous animal and has a completely different digestive tract than humans, different rules apply.
With that food try a test and soak the kibble in water and see how big it grows. The higher amount of grained kibble will grow 2 and 3 times there normal size. The more nutritionaly dense a food is takes less cups to feed and in water won't grow very much or in the dogs stomach.
how much a kibble inflates doesn't only depend on its grain content. it also depends on the content of moisture it had to begin with, on the solubility of the source of fiber that is used and the density of the kibble. a big kibble that is very porous will soak up more moisture and inflate much more than a small, dense one. think about the choice of medium you use to mop up a mess of spilled fluid. a handful of crude straw isn't going to soak up nearly as much as it would if you first ground it into a fine powder with a much higher surface area.
i'm going to skip over most of the next paragraph since we are not arguing about the needs of a working dog at all here, but about feeding an average household pet. to go back to the comparison with humans, we are not trying to feed olympic athletes, we are concerned about the everyday needs of the average house pet.
just a few short comments:
"density" and "nutritional density" can not be used interchangeably. the fact that a kibble is dense doesn't automatically mean it is high in nutritinal value, and vice versa. further, a larger kibble doesn't automatically mean it's less nutrient dense. case in point: kibbles that are offered in different sizes, e.g. regular and "small bites". of the smaller kibble, you will get more to fit into a given volume unit since there is less "air space" between the individual kibbles.
The point of these denser foods is so the dogs digestive system gets a break from all that bulk of the less caloric foods that were the norm for so many years and a major factor in the studies done on liver and kidney failure in older animals.
bulk is not the problem. neither is too much protein. the true culprit, as has emerged from more recent studies is the phosphorus content, which is quite high in poor quality foods.
I don't know how you figure it falls short when you look at the calorie per pound. It dosen't fall short. You have to compare applicable foods and Innova and Health Wise dose have applicable Kcals per pound compared to what I feed and many other foods.
i would very well say that for example a food that lists a guaranteed analysis of 30.5% protein, 20.5% fat and 27.99% carbohydrates with a caloric content of 1795 ME per pound falls short of one that lists a guaranteed analysis of 24% protein, 14% fat and 40.6% carbohydrates at a caloric content of 1895 ME per pound, because the second food is obviously more digestible - if the first one were more digestible, the higher fat content alone would increase the caloric content drastically.
let's look at it from an ideal viewpoint where both foods were equally digestible. we will use the basic calculation that one gram of protein or carbohydrates supplies 4 kcal and one gram of fat 9 kcal.
the first food should supply
(30.5*4 + 20.5*9 + 27.99*4)/78.99 = (122 + 184.5 + 111.96)/78.99 = 5.3 kcal per gram (1/1000 kilogram)
the second food should supply
(24*4 + 14*9 + 40.6*4)/78.6 = (96 + 126 + 162.4)/78.6 = 4.8 kcal per gram
as per the data natura has on their website, the first food supplies 3.950 kcal per gram and the second 4.168 kcal per gram. you see that the healthwise is "off" by 1.35 kcal per gram, while the innova is only off by 0.632 kcal per gram. the amount each food is "off" by represents the energy that could not be utilized by the body and is excreted in poop and pee.
if you'd like to post detailed data for the food you feed, you can easily go through the same calculation and compare. what you need to know for this is the content of protein, fat and carbs on an "as fed" basis tho, since AAFCO labels list protein and fat as minimums and not on "as fed" basis.
as someonw who has fed california natural, innova adult and innova evo, i can tell you that the listed caloric content is ME, not GE.
Everything from 15% and higher has always been aimed at the working or hard playing dog. 12% fat is more of a maintenance %.
again i'm not quite sure what that statement is supposed to mean. what i can tell you is that fat is one of the more costly ingredients in pet food and is thus used sparingly where it's not needed. in more sedentary dogs, the basic need is for skin and coat health, despite the fact that fat is the most natural energy source for carnivorous animals.
With all due respect to you here. Your information is a little out dated and human requirements with calories dosen't hold water.
my information is neither "outdated" and i'd like to hear just why exactly the principle "doesn't hold water" when it comes to dogs. so far, you haven't made any statements as to why exactly my information is outdated and doesn't hold water. i don't claim to be above anyone else and believe that there's always something new to learn, but statements devoid of facts don't help in that regard at all.
neither am i arguing that eagle pack is not a good food, which seems to be the issue of your argument here as far as i understand your post. eagle
is one of the better foods on the market.
what i'm still missing after all this is any tangible information on the food you are feeding, which you claimed only contains 26% and 15% grains respectively.