This includes activities like beating the heart, breathing, and digesting food.Calculate by multiplying your dogs body weight, raised to the ¾ power, by 70.RER = 70 ^0.75Note: Remember PEMDAS. RER is the energy required to perform essential body functions. Now, lets talk activity, exercise and lifestyle. This is what your dog needs to sustain life. As a general rule, it is individualized.Īt Rogue Pet Science your dogs health and nutrition is important to us, check us out for more information! Determine Maintenance Energy Requirements In other words, the concept of calories in, calories out for weight gain, maintenance or loss may not be something that can be extrapolated out for an entire population, human or animal. The entire concept does not give credit to the complexity of nutrition, metabolism or individual differences among dogs. In fact, this dogma has led to some unintended nutrition and health consequences. As a society we have been conditioned to believe the solution to this is to restrict calories in order to lose or control weight, but is this approach correct? Likely not, or at least it is just one piece of the puzzle. An alarming statistic shows us that 60% of cats and dogs are estimated to be overweight or obese in America today. To put the importance of this discussion into context, obesity is an epidemic among pets and people. This is because there are multiple factors that dictate how a body utilizes and expends these calories from different foods. However, the science behind a calorie, and the energy they supply is not as simple as it may seem. Calories, which only come from food, provide the body with energy to carry out numerous metabolic functions. Why A Calorie Isnt A Calorie In Your Dog Food: Calorie is a common term most often used to describe the energy density of human or animal food. For example, if a canned food has 75 percent moisture and 4 percent fat: 100 75 = 25 percent dry matter 4 ÷ 25 = 16 percent fat on a dry matter basis Calories Dont Mean Nutrition: Every Dog Is Different Then divide the as fed percentage by the amount of dry matter to get the dry matter percentage. To calculate dry matter percentages, first determine the amount of dry matter by subtracting the percentage of moisture from 100. Dont worry it sounds technical, but its easy to do. Any serious discussion of nutrition, or comparison of dry and wet diets, then, requires the conversion of the nutrient values from as fed to dry matter. What you really want to know is how much fat is in the food part of the food the dry matter.

So, think about it: When a label says that a food contains 4 percent fat, in order to really understand how much fat you are about to feed your dog, you also have to know how much moisture is in the food. Kibble generally contains about 10 percent moisture wet foods contain as much as 80 percent or more moisture. Some percentage of the food is comprised of moisture, which of course contains no protein, fat, fiber, or other nutrients. The percentages of protein, fat, etc., shown on a pet food label are expressed as fed meaning, as the food is delivered in its package. “DOCTOR B’s B.A.R.F.” Diet & Popular Dry Dog Food Calorie Calculator

Food calorie calculator