While the guaranteed analysis is confusing, the INGREDIENT LIST can be down
right misleading.  Because you know the ingredients are queued in
descending order, based on weight, the assumption is that the food contains
more of the first item than the second and so forth.  Ok, quiz time.  Which
weighs more, a cup of feathers or a tablespoon of lead?  So, are you
getting more feathers or more lead?  The problem is one of scale (ooooo,
pun!); the way we measure weight is not the same as how we measure volume.
When we see that chicken is listed before rice, we assume there is a
greater VOLUME of chicken compared to rice.  All it means is the chicken
weighs more than the rice.  That's it, nothing else, so don't egg me on.
 
This is always a source of confusion.  For example, I recently read a food
was 70% crude carbohydrate, yet, upon close inspection, the guaranteed
analysis suggested a figure of 35-40%.  There was no error; the first
source was comparing VOLUMES, not compositional percentages.  The real
difficulty is when the scale of measurement isn't mentioned, just a
percentage.  It's a heavy issue, found on a huge scale.
 
Slight of hand trick 1.  Ingredients are listed as ordinal objects; that
is, they are listed in ORDER of weight, NOT by actual weight.  This means
you never know how much you have of each ingredient.  The list may say
"chicken, rice, corn, corn gluten, corn meal, rice gluten," which gives you
the impression that there is more chicken than anything else.  You know the
chicken weighs more than ANY ONE of the other ingredients, but you don't
know by how much.  You might have 10 oz of chicken, 9.5 oz of rice, 9 oz
of corn, 8.5 oz corn gluten, 8 oz corn meal, and 7.5 oz rice gluten.  In
essence, you would have 10 oz of chicken parts and 42.5 oz of plant parts.
So, the manufacturer has "implanted" the idea there is more poultry than
botanical carbohydrate through careful manipulation of the ingredient
rooster.
 
Slight of hand trick 2.  Which weighs more; a 16 oz steak OR the jerky
made from a 16 oz steak?  The steak does, because it contains more water.
Ingredients are listed by weight, but NOT moisture corrected.  If you mix
dry carbohydrates and wet meat protein, you are allowed to list the wet
protein first, even though their ordinal sequence would reverse if the
moisture content was equal.  Assume 100 g of meat has 70 g of water.  It
outweighs 80 g of dried corn starch that has 10 g of water.  Now, normalize
the contents so both ingredients have zero moisture, and the corn starch
would now weigh 70 g, outweighing the meat at 25 g.  So, even though meat
is listed first, you are buying water.  There is a clue to recognizing this
practice; look carefully at the ingredients and to see which items are
typically mixed in a dry, damp or wet state.  Like compulsive internet
spammers, the ones that are all wet will be noticed, I mean listed, first.
 
Slight of hand trick 3.  People are starting to demand better quality foods
containing more meat.  However, some types of food require large amounts
of carbohydrates to make; kibbles and extruded biscuits have 35-70%
carbohydrates (+/-5%, with a 47% mean).  Since consumers want their dried
cake and meat it too, they demand food with more meat than carbohydrate.
The food maker gets around this by using different types of the same
component, allowing them to be listed separately.  In this way, meat is
displayed FIRST, even though the total ingredients which originate from
plants may predominate the mixture (see the example in the first trick
above).  There is simply NO way of figuring out the actual amounts of
"meat" versus "plant" from the listed ingredients and guaranteed analysis
in the "Caesar salad" called kibble.  Eat queue, brute.
 
Consumer tricks.  Listed ingredients CAN give you an idea of quality IF you
recognize supplements are typically added to replace nutrients due to low
quality food and/or processing and cooking.  HIgh quality foods and careful
processing GENERALLY require fewer supplements to make the food complete.
Also, the more TYPES of plant materials, the lower quality of the food (in
general).  One of the best tricks is to carefully monitor poopie output.
Generally speaking, high quality foods result in lower piles of poop.
 
Finally, there is the flatulence factor.  Bacterial carbohydrate metabolism
results in intestinal gas, so the more fert farts, the more carbohydrates
in the diet.  Sort of like the song, "Eating cheap kibble's a musical
sport; the more you eat, the more you retort..."
 
Bob C and 16 Mo' Musical Mustelines
[Posted in FML issue 3033]