This is an in depth look into the ingredients in Blue Buffalo dog food. It's so important to do a review of the dog food you are feeding your four legged best friend. It could mean the difference between 11 years of happy living or 9 years of suffering. So many of the common problems that dogs have can be linked to sub quality ingredients, fillers, preservatives, and artificial colorings used in almost all commercial dog food. Don't let the happy go lucky commercials and slick advertising campaigns fool you into feeding your dog unhealthy food. Be smart, get informed, and research your dog food by reading as many reviews from as many websites as possible.

Blue Buffalo dog food is a company that likes to promote their natural and organic dog food ingredients. I am going to randomly choose one of Blue Buffalo's dog foods and check out the full list of ingredients paying close attention to the top five because these are what constitutes most of the food volume.

I've chosen to look at the Blue Wilderness dog food. The top five ingredients are:

(1) deboned chicken
(2) chicken meal
(3) Potato Starch
(4) Turkey Meal
(5) Whitefish Meal.

All right, I can see that there are four out of the top five ingredients that are meat products. When looking at the first ingredient you have to take into consideration that the deboned chicken is at the top because they are including its water weight in the measurement. In reality, if you took out all the water from the deboned chicken, as it happens in the process of making dried dog food, then you would have to rank it much lower in the list of ingredients. The second ingredient is chicken meal which is made by cooking the chicken at extremely high temperatures and then extracting the fat and drying the leftover meat residue. Chicken meal is readily absorbed by digestion and is a good source of protein. In the Blue Wilderness dog food they use rosemary to preserve the freshness of this ingredient as opposed to some artificial and harmful chemical, which is a plus. Turkey meal is very low is easy to digest and is low in cholesterol. Turkey meal is a good source for protein as well as all kinds of essential vitamins like calcium, iron, zinc, and B vitamins which are needed for a healthy dog. Whitefish meal is a good source for protein as well as omega oils which promote a healthy coat.

When we look at the full list of ingredients for Blue Wilderness dog food we find some interesting things like sweet potatoes and oatmeal. These ingredients are healthy carbohydrates and oatmeal is a much better filler than wheatbran or corn, which are hard to digest. Going farther down the list there are ingredients like blueberries, cranberries, carrots, and barley grass. You wouldn't normally consider these berries and grass to be a natural part of a wild dog's diet but in fact they are. When a dog in the wild eats another animal, that animal usually will have a diet high in grasses, nuts, and grains, so the dog is absorbing the nutrients from the herbivore. These ingredients really set this dog food apart from the rest. Another quality ingredient is flax seed which is a natural source for Omega-6 fatty acids, which as we discussed earlier, promote a healthy coat and cut down on a dog's dry flaky skin. On top of all of the earlier mentioned quality nutrients in this dog food there is also lots of vitamin supplements for things like A vitamins, vitamin B12, vitamin E, etc. Another source for Omega fatty acids is the herring oil. There is even green tea extract and tumeric, both which have healing and medicinal properties in the Blue Wilderness dog food.

When looking at the full picture of this dog food it gives you a sense that Blue Buffalo cares about the ingredients they are putting in their dog food. I would encourage you to read as many dog food reviews as you can to see what you are going to feed to your pet.