How much do you know about petfood digestibility

How Much Do You Know About Petfood Digestibility

In recent years, more and more pet owners have become concerned about the "digestibility" of their petfood. The quality of petfood depends not only on the ingredients and formula, but also on the digestibility of petfood. Of course, the better raw material and formula, the higher protein, and digestibility is higher. But today we're going to talk about other factors that affect digestibility

It has been said that the relative amount of nutrients in petfood that can be absorbed by pets is determined by digestibility，therefore, "digestibility of petfood" can also be used as an index to evaluate the quality of petfood. Then how do you determine the digestibility？

In the United States, AAFCO published a draft for the Determination of Metabolizable energy content in Dog and Cat diets, it has become the standard for "determining nutrient digestibility". Digestibility = (nutrients consumed -- nutrient excretion in faeces)/feed intake x100%. The digestibility of dry matter and protein can directly reflect the quality of raw materials. Generally speaking, the better the quality of raw materials, the higher the digestibility.

In 2003, AAFCO recommended a method of measuring digestibility that is now used by many American petfood factories: animal testing. During the experiment, healthy pets will be selected and fed with the petfood for 5 days to get used to it, which is called the adaptation period of petfood. Then, we feed it for another five days and select the faeces again. The "digestibility" was calculated by measuring the ratio of protein to dry matter in pet faeces.

The following is a flowchart for measuring dog food digestibility, published in Scoopin's for Science.

So what factors affect digestibility?

1. Processing of petfood

Digestibility not only depends on the raw material of petfood, but also is affected by many factors.The size of petfood also affects the digestibility. Experiments show that: the smaller the size of petfood, the higher the digestibility of petfood. However, the production cost of petfood with small size will be higher, and the increase in cost will lead to the increase in the overall price of the product, which will affect the number of buyers and lead to the poor circulation of the product sales.The nutritional value of commercial petfood is affected by the pretreatment conditions, particle crushing and extrusion steam granulation.

2. Pet's age, size

The larger the dogs are, the less water is in their faeces when they ate the same petfood, it means that the size of the pet had a direct effect on digestibility. However, the breed of pet does not affect digestibility.Meanwhile, The younger the pet, the lower the digestibility of petfood, but as the pet is an adult, the digestibility is almost the same. Moreover, even the dogs become old and frail, they still have digestive rates similar to those of young and middle-aged, but older dogs are slower to respond to starch and take longer to digest. Therefore, in the face of the dog has entered the old age, we need to feed the relative period of the elderly dog pet food, and increase feeding more functional petfood, including snacks that improve intestines and stomach, promote metabolism, promote blood circulation, delay bone aging and osteoporosis.

3. Pet's home environment

Living conditions and environment also play a role in a pet's digestibility, but it's difficult to quantify. For example, pets living in cold environments maintain their body temperature through compensatory metabolism, and their food digestibility is higher than pets living in comfortable environments.

Meanwhile, whether pets get enough light and exercise each day can affect their own digestibility to some extent, so this also is one of the reasons why we advocate giving pets enough outdoor activities.

As a factory with 17 years of experience in producing pet snacks, we Tai’an Chaotai Pet Products Co., Ltd always insist on putting continuous innovation, attentive service, bring more happy moments for pet families as our mission, continuously provide customers with stable, reliable and sustainable petfood.  Our dog snacks have been tested by SGS laboratory that the protein content and digestibility are much higher than those of other factories in the petfood industry. Moreover, our products are well received by consumers all over the world.