Shun NagaiIf you are reading this article, you may be considering developing a pet food product. What the market demands is a well-balanced food that dogs and cats enjoy eating while also helping them maintain good health. You would likely aim to create a product that is highly nutritious and contributes to longevity, which means you would need to choose ingredients very carefully.
However, when conducting market research and picking up pet food products in stores, you may notice that many of them contain grains in their ingredient lists. At that point, you may begin to wonder: Why are grains used in pet food?
Are Grains Just Fillers?
It may seem strange that dog and cat food often contains corn and other grains. In popular media, these ingredients are often criticized as fillers or misunderstood as cheap substitutes for protein.
From a nutritional point of view, however, grains provide many essential nutrients that help support pet health. For that reason, they should be understood as something entirely different from fillers, which generally refers to ingredients with little or no nutritional value.
The Benefits Grains Provide
For animals, including humans, what matters is not the ingredient itself, but whether the necessary nutrients can be obtained from the diet. Essential nutrients, by definition, cannot be synthesized in sufficient amounts by the body and therefore must be supplied through food. For this reason, it is important not to focus only on ingredient names in pet food, but also on the nutrients that grains can provide.
| Grain-related benefit | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Digestible carbohydrates | Grains provide dogs and cats with easily digestible carbohydrates, which serve as an energy source. |
| Omega-6 fatty acids | Corn is one of the rich sources of omega-6 fatty acids, especially linoleic acid, which is essential for healthy skin and coat. |
| Protein, fiber, vitamins, and minerals | Grains such as wheat, oats, rice, corn, and barley provide protein, dietary fiber, and essential vitamins and minerals. |
Can Grains Cause Allergies?
Food allergies occur when an animal’s immune system mistakenly identifies a specific protein as a foreign substance and triggers an immune response. As a result, skin problems such as itching, scratching, and chronic ear infections may occur, as well as digestive issues such as vomiting and diarrhea.
In dogs and cats, the most common causes of food allergies are animal proteins such as beef, dairy products, chicken, and fish in the case of cats.
It is possible for a pet to have a sensitivity to a specific grain, but this is far less common than allergies caused by animal proteins.
For that reason, completely avoiding grains by feeding a grain-free diet cannot necessarily be considered the best way to manage food allergies in pets.
Should Pets Be Fed a Diet Containing Grains?
Corn and other grains have been used in commercial pet food for many years. This is not a new trend in pet food.
These ingredients are often misunderstood as having little nutritional value for pets. However, the recent tendency to avoid grains and recommend grain-free diets is not based on solid scientific evidence, but has largely been influenced by marketing.
What matters most is not what the ingredient is called, but what nutrients dogs and cats actually need. From that perspective, grains can be considered valuable ingredients because they contain many of the nutrients pets require.
In fact, including grains in pet food offers many health benefits and contributes to providing complete and balanced nutrition overall.