How much FAT is really in that food?

It can be very tricky to figure out the true amount of fat in a food.  The amount of water contained in a food greatly alters the reported fat content (what shows up on the label), and if you want to get an apples-to-apples sort of number for fats, you need to look at how much fat would be in the food if the water weren’t there.  This is known as a dry matter basis for food comparisons.

There are places on the internet that will show you how to calculate the dry matter nutrient content of pet foods, and they also describe it much more intelligently than I am capable of doing.  For an in-depth look at nutritional analyses on pet food labels, I would refer you to this article by Dog Food Advisor.

You’ll notice there is math involved.  Fortunately for those who are math challenged (or simply lazy, like me), there’s an easy way to calculate the dry matter content of nutrients.  Balance IT has a nice calculator on their website; all you have to do is plug in the numbers from the label of any food into the guaranteed analysis converter and it will calculate those values for you.

Here’s the link:

Balance IT guaranteed analysis converter.