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What is a Salmon Diet?
When you read the ingredients list of your dog’s favorite food, you almost always find ingredients that you don’t know, and a meaty food like Salmon Meal may be one of them.
Although Salmon is well known, many dog owners are not sure what Salmon Meal means and if it is something their dog should be eating.
What is a Salmon Diet?
Salmon Meal is a concentrated form of Salmon meat and tissue that has been processed to remove most of its moisture.
This process, known as rendering, is carried out on an industrial scale and produces other well-known animal products such as Beef Tallow.
Many dog owners do not realize that whole meat ingredients such as Salmon, Chicken, or Beef contain a very high proportion of water or moisture, which is 75%.
You can see a few examples in the chart below.
As you can see, Salmon sits in the middle of the pack when compared to other meat and fish ingredients, with a moisture content of around 67%.
This high moisture content means that when the meat is cooked during dry dog food recipes, most of this moisture is lost, leaving only a small portion of the meat remaining.
But the portion remains stable due to meat foods such as Salmon Meal that remove this moisture early.
Salmon Meal is an example of a responsible and transparent meat food ingredient as it must be produced from Salmon-based ingredients.
This is in contrast to other meat meals such as Bone and Meat Meal, which are less versatile and can be made with a variety of ingredients.
You can read more about Bone Meal in our dedicated discussion – Bone Meal In Dog Food.
Why Salmon Food Is Dog Food
Nutritious food
As we mentioned earlier, Salmon Meal has had most of its moisture removed, which means it is a very dense ingredient full of protein and animal fat.
This nutrient density allows pet food manufacturers to include a smaller portion of Salmon Meal to provide more nutrition than whole salmon ingredients.
While red meat tends to contain a higher amount of fat and chicken tends to contain a higher ratio of protein, salmon sits somewhere in the middle with a protein-to-fat ratio of 40:60, although this can vary depending on the source.
Costs
It also happens that meat meals like Salmon Meal are cheaper to buy than whole Salmon ingredients.
This is because most of the Salmon used to produce Salmon Meal are fillets and cuts of meat that are less desirable than the ones you are used to in the supermarket.
This could be the remains of the salmon meat on the bones after being removed during the filling process or the meat content of the head of the Salmon.
While that may not seem appealing, those scraps and trimmings are still very nutrient dense, and dogs won’t turn their noses up at them.
Storage and Security
An often overlooked reason that meat foods like Salmon Meal use whole meat ingredients is that they are less prone to spoilage once served.
This is an important feature in the pet food manufacturing industry and reduces the risk of problems that could lead to recalls.
It also allows manufacturers to more easily transport and store ingredients over time, allowing for a more efficient supply chain.
Dog Food Products Using Salmon Meal
Given the growing popularity of Salmon in dog food recipes, the number of recipes that include Salmon Meal is important.
Some popular examples of dog food brands that regularly include Salmon Meal as an ingredient in their recipes include Signature, Taste of the Wild, Wellness, Purina Pro Plan, Blue Buffalo, Canidae, Merrick, Earthborn Holistic, Go!, Nulo, and Instinct.
While recently researching the use of ingredients in dog food preparation, we found that of the 100 most popular dry dog food recipes on Chewy.com, only five of them contain Salmon Meal as an ingredient.less than we expected.
It is possible that most of the Salmon dishes included in the recipe are not in this selected list, or it may indicate that many dogs like other meat ingredients.
Regardless, you can see a great example of using Salmon Meal in a dog food recipe in Go!’s Solutions Skin + Coat Care Salmon Recipe ingredient list.
As you can see, Salmon meal is the most abundant ingredient in the recipe, and given its density, this translates into a large portion of Salmon.
There is a small portion of Salmon in there as well, but given its previous plant-based ingredients like Oatmeal, Potatoes, and Oats, the portion size is not very large.
However, some brands use much larger portions of Salmon combined with Salmon Meal. You can see an example of this in the ingredient list for Taste of the Wild’s Ancient Stream recipe.
In this example, you can see Salmon is the most abundant ingredient and is combined with a small portion of Salmon Meal.
Despite the small portion size, the density of Salmon Meal may mean that it contains more Salmon than the portion of Salmon itself.
Also, be aware of the Ocean Fish Meal component which means that the combination of the three ingredients results in a large proportion of fish-based protein and fat.
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