We fed our dog mostly Purina One Natural Blends dog food until a few months ago when I saw an advertisement for The Goodlife Recipe dog food.
The two dog food products are very similar in that the packaging of both dog foods claims that the food is manufactured with natural ingredients and that it is healthy for your dog. Both products are dry dog foods.
I decided to make a more detailed examination of the products. I compared the products in five areas (for this project I examined The Goodlife Recipe’s real chicken, brown rice & vegetables and Purina One Natural Blend’s chicken and oat meal formula):
Ingredients
I took a look at the first seven ingredients listed on the packaging of each dog food. (Note, there were more than seven ingredients in each dog food, I just looked at the first seven because packaging laws require that ingredients be listed in the order of greatest amount to least amount.) Here is what I found.
Purina One Naturals: chicken, corn gluten meal, poultry byproduct meal, brown rice, oat meal, whole grain corn, and whole grain wheat.
The Goodlife Recipe: ground corn, chicken by-product meal, corn gluten meal, chicken animal fat, whole grain brown rice, natural poultry flavor, and dried peas
I was pleased to see that first seven ingredients were natural sounding and not the names of chemicals. If the ingredients were truly listed on the package in order from greatest to least amount, then that means that both products do contain mostly natural ingredients.
Nutrition
For the nutrition comparison I looked at five areas: crude protein, crude fat, crude fiber, moisture, and linoleic acid. (These nutritional elements are listed on the product label.) First, I wondered what linoleic acid was so I looked it up and found an answer on Yahoo Pets. Apparently linoleic acid meets the fat requirement for dogs.
I found that both dog foods contain the same amount of crude protein, (min) 26%. Purina One Natural Blends contains significantly more crude fat, (min) 16% than Goodlife Recipe (min) 10%. The Goodlife Recipe contained slightly more crude fiber (max) 4% than Purina One Natural Blends (max) 3%. The two dog foods contained an identical amount of moisture, (max) 12%. The Goodlife Recipe had slightly more linoleic acid than Purina One Natural Blends, (max) 1.5 % versus (max) 1.4%.
Quantity Required
At 16 and ½ pounds my dog is fairly small. I wondered how much of each food would meet her daily requirement. According to the packaging, I will need to feed her a little bit more of the The Goodlife Recipe dog food (1 ¾ cup) than the Purina One Natural Blends dog food (1 ½ cup).
Appearance
The two dog foods differ in appearance. The Purina One Natural Blends dog food is comprised of dry morsels that are roughly uniform in shape and color. The Goodlife Recipe dog food is made up of dry morsels of varying shapes and sizes. The differences between the morsel shapes and sizes may just be cosmetic, but I almost thought that I could see the various ingredients in the dog food: greenish morsels for the dried peas, tan morsels for the chicken animal fat, small lightly colored morsels for the ground corn, and so on.
Cost
The Goodlife Recipe dog food is slightly cheaper. I got a small package (4 lbs) of The Goodlife Recipe dog food for slightly over $4.00 at my local grocery store. This makes The Goodlife Recipe dog food just a little bit more than $1.00 a pound. The Purina One Natural Blends dog food was a little more expensive. I got a 2 lb container of Purina One Natural Blends dog food for slightly over $3.00. This makes the Purina One dog food about $1.50 a pound.
Let the Dog Decide
All in all, the products seemed very similar to me. As I mentioned earlier we had been using the Purina One Natural Blends product and our dog seemed healthy and happy. When we switched to The Goodlife Recipe I could detect no differences in the dog’s health or behavior.
I decided to let the dog decide which dog food she preferred. I placed a handful of each dog food on the floor about a foot a part and waited to see which dog food the dog would choose. After sniffing both dog foods, our dog gobbled up all of the Goodlife Recipe dog food. She did eventually eat the Purina One Natural Blends dog food, but only after repeatedly checking the spot where the Goodlife Recipe dog food had been.
So, there you have it right from our dog’s mouth. The Goodlife Recipe dog food has a slight advantage over Purina One Natural Blends dog food
Reference:
- Yahoo Pets (pets.yahoo.com/pets/dogs/hn/nutrients_in_pet_foods)
