Vitamins in Your Dog’s Food: Synthetic or Natural?

Can you believe it?! Another dog food recall this week. This time, family company, Fromm has voluntarily recalled their Four Star Shredded Entrees canned food because of elevated vitamin D. Vitamins in your dog’s food are a vital and necessary ingredient, but sometimes the pre-mix suppliers mess up. This results in the wrong ratios of something or other going in the pre-mix, along with dangerous, and even deadly vitamin levels in your Best Friend’s food.

What Are Vitamin Pre-Mixes?

All animals need essential vitamins and nutrients. That’s why AAFCO (The American Association of Feed Control Officers) oversees pet food production and nutritional guidelines. All foods must fall in AAFCO’s requirements to be considered complete and balanced.

From Trouw Nutrition; a supplier of pet food vitamin premixes:

“Premixes provide pet food with more uniform dispersion of key vitamins and minerals, while significantly reducing your risk of reaching toxic levels of a nutrient.”

The extrusion process to manufacture kibble dog food uses high heat levels, sometimes heating the ingredients up to 4 times. This depletes the raw ingredients of vital nutrients, enzymes, and helpful bacteria they would have if gently cooked or fed raw.

To maintain the nutrient levels in pet foods, manufacturers make vitamin premixes, which are added to the food during production. Most of the vitamin premixes are manufactured in Asia. Therefore, premixes are typically not made by the pet food companies, but added during the production process.

Your dog’s complete and balanced kibble is likely complete and balanced because of vitamin fortification. Most of the time, these vitamins in your dog’s food are synthetic.

What’s the Difference? Synthetic or Natural Vitamins in Your Dog’s Food

Natural vitamins and nutrients are obtained from whole-food sources in the diet.

Synthetic vitamins are a mirror image of their real counterpart. They are made in an industrial process.

Chemically, synthetic vitamins are nearly identical to their natural twin. The manufacturing process is much different, so living beings may have different reactions to synthetic vitamins. The same goes for your dog.

When your dog eats real, wholesome foods, his body absorbs an array of different vitamins, minerals, and enzymes; not just one. Synthetic vitamins do not have the range different enzymes, vitamins and minerals. Therefore, your dog’s body may process them differently and less efficiently than vitamins in real food.

For example, human studies support that vitamin E from real food sources (like seeds and nuts) is absorbed twice as easily as synthetic vitamin E.

Additionally, trace minerals like chromium, copper, iodine, and zinc are all absent from synthetic vitamins and must come from whole food sources. Synthetic vitamins in your dog’s food may not contain enough of these trace minerals.

How to Read those Labels

Obviously, you want the best for your Best Friend. Spotting synthetic vitamins on dog food labels is fairly straightforward.

1. If a food is marketed as “Natural” it must state on the bag: with added vitamins and minerals.
2. If a mineral or vitamin has 2 names, it’s likely a synthetic vitamin. For example; synthetic vitamin B1 is Thiamine Monotrate.
3. Better yet, look at the ingredient panel. Find the salt on the panel. AAFCO recommends that dry dog food must contain 0.3% sodium, which is a necessary nutrient. According to most manufacturers’ formulas, everything after salt is a miniscule amount of the food. Vitamins in your dog’s food appear after the salt. Often, vitamins and minerals take up about 2/3rd of the label, especially if they’re synthetic.

Read Those Labels!

You love your dog. He’s your Best Friend. Above all, you owe it to him to be as informed and educated as you possibly can over the nutrition you provide. You are the one who has control over what goes in his body. You are the one who chooses the foods he eats. While vitamins in your dog’s food are necessary, they don’t necessarily have to all come from synthetic sources.

Pet food companies cannot control the quality of their raw ingredients when they rely on other companies to produce the raw ingredients. It is really up to us as consumers to pay attention to those labels.

There is so much you can decipher about your bag of pet food simply by reading the labels and learning just a bit about the ingredients. For the health, happiness, and long life of your Best Friend, read those labels!