Chicken meal, for sure, is a lot better than pure chicken. This is because chicken meal has already been processed and cooked to kill bacteria and other unwanted toxins. Chicken is just chicken.

What you might not know about chicken is that it is made mostly of water. If a label on a bag of dog food says 60% whole chicken that is quite misleading as that does not take into account how much of that 60% of chicken is left after baking it to remove unwanted substances.

To understand deeper about dog foods, you need to know that not all dog foods have the same moisture levels. Some canned foods have moisture levels as high as 80% while other dry foods' moisture levels are as low as 6%. This is important for two reasons.

First, since dog food is priced by its weight, it could get quite expensive because when you buy dog food that is 70% water, you are in fact getting only 30% real food.

The second reason is when you know that there is different moisture levels present in dog foods, you can compare fats and proteins between different brands and among dry and canned dog foods. To achieve this, you need to convert the percentage number to a dry matter base.

Converting the number to a dry matter basis is simple. Let's say the label on a dog food says 25% moisture and 35% protein. To compute the percentage of protein on a dry matter basis, you just have to do these 2 simple steps. First, 25% moisture means 75% (100% - 25%) dry mater. Second, divide 35% protein by the 75% dry matter. 35/75 = 46.7% protein on a dry matter basis.

What about canned dog foods then? The same calculations apply. Let's say the dog food label says 70% moisture and 10% protein. What this actually means is 30% (100% - 70%) dry matter and 10/30 = 33.3% protein on a dry matter basis. We can use this same computing method for fibers and fats as well.

If you are familiar with the above calculations, then spotting a nutritious dog food is not difficult at all. You just need to read and calculate.