Wet or dry: is one better than the other?
The short answer is no. When looking at wet and dry food, one is not better than the other. With any food you want to look for ingredients that are of a high quality, easily digested and suit your individual dog. The nutrients levels are also important as you don’t want to feed a high energy food to a couch potato!
How do I compare the nutrients in wet and dry dog food?
There is often confusion when comparing the contents of dried food to moist or wet foods, because their protein levels can look extremely different. For example, a dry food diet might say it has a protein content of 18%, whereas a can or tray of wet dog food might only list 8%, which obviously appears much less.
This is because these percentages do not take into consideration the amount of moisture versus dry matter in the food. To properly compare protein and fat levels in dry and wet dog food, they must be calculated on a dry matter basis.
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Wet Food
To calculate protein levels in wet food on a dry matter basis, you must first subtract the moisture (water) content from your calculations (for our Burns range, this is usually around 75%). This means all the nutrients in the food are in the other 25%, which is then the number we use to calculate our new dry matter percentage. If your original protein content was 8%, you would calculate as follows:
% of protein: 8 ÷ 25 x 100 = 32% protein on a dry matter basis
% of fat: 6 ÷ 25 x 100 = 24% fat on a dry matter basis
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Dry Food
Unlike wet food which has 75% moisture and only 25% dry matter, dry food contains much more dry matter (usually 90%), so the calculations for protein and fat content are going to look different. If your originally protein percentage in the dry food is 18%, then divide this by 90% before multiplying by 100 to find your protein on a dry matter basis.
% of protein: 18 ÷ 90 x 100 = 20% protein on a dry matter basis
% of fat: 10 ÷ 90 x 100 = 11.1% fat on a dry matter basis
Can I mix wet and dry food together?
Yes! Many owners mix wet food and dry food together. This is completely fine as long as we adjust their feeding amounts accordingly. As a rough guide, 10g of the Burns dry food is the equivalent to 40g of the Burns wet food.
Shop our full range of wet and dry dog food here:
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