After standing for hours staring at endless bags of dog food, I still don't know what is best for my doxie.She's not overweight,and from what I've read, never want her to be,I want what's best for her,as we all want for our pets.So how is a lay man sopposed to know????

I have done the same thing - reading all those ingrediants on each bag. I did some research on the internet and found out which ingrediants are really important to be listed as the top ingrediants and which ones you don't want in there. This website is pretty helpful to make sure you get a good food. Dog Food Reviews - Main Index - Powered by ReviewPost

Hope it helps!!

You want to look for foods with real meat as the first ingredient. You want to make sure the food does NOT contain by-products, corn , wheat, soy, artificial colors, flavors or presertivies. Some good brands include Wellness, Innova, Merrick, Blue Buffalo, Solid Gold, Nature's Variety Prairie.

orangedog, made a really good point. Dogs are carnivorous by nature so next time you go to the pet store flip over the bag of food you normally get and if within the first three or four ingredients is says, "Corn", "Wheat", or "By-product", consider searching for a higher quality brand.

Corn and wheat are fillers which basically translates to waste. Somewhere on every bag of dog food there is a feeding chart. This chart gives you guidelines to follow as to how much you should feed your dog to fulfill your dogs daily allowance of nutrients. You'll notice the dog foods that are cheaper will require you to feed your dog more to meet the nutritional requirements. The higher quality brands will generally require you to feed your dog less food to meet the same nutritional requirements.

I would do the math for my customers and we would come to the conclusion that they would actually be spending more money on the lower quality dog food because they had to purchase the bags quicker than the higher quality foods. The higher quality foods would last longer because their dogs didn't require as much food every day.

Along with the food's orangedog listed Canidae, Pinnacle, and Natural Balance tend to be pretty good foods as well.

Hope this helps, John from fun4pets.