Chicken Or Chicken Meal?

[Chewy401]

i've heard different things on this, but what's better in dog food?

[KeeperBoy]

Chicken meal. Chicken is inclusive of water content, therefore its actual weight is only about 30% of what it weighed when they put in it the food. Chicken meal has the moisture removed at the time it is weighed to be added to the food.

[Ron]

chicken meal is most of the water and fat removed as versus chicken contains water and fat

Chicken-by-product is the one you should avoid. It contains all the other chick parts....

[KeeperBoy]

This is form another site...

Example 1:
Chicken, chicken meal, turkey, turkey meal, brown rice, chicken fat….

That looks excellent. There are “four” meat ingredients at the head of the ingredient list. And only one grain. Once we factor in the removal of water content (which is about 80%) from the ingredients “chicken” and “turkey” then it is likely that these would be more accurately placed somewhat further down the ingredient list. A more likely “true” ingredient list here is thus: chicken meal, turkey meal, brown rice, chicken fat, chicken (sans water), turkey (sans water).

So how does it look now? Actually, still very good. The first two ingredients are still meat products, and there are two further meat products in the food. There is only one grain ahead of the fat content. We could have a very high level of confidence that there really was a decent quantity of meat products in the food.