Revaluation of nutrient contents in home-prepared diets for adult dogs at maintenance

Abstract

We reevaluated the nutrient sufficiency and excess in home-prepared diets for dogs at maintenance using recipes collected in our previous study (n＝208). Evaluation of nutrient sufficiency and excess was performed according to Minimum and Maximum in AAFCO Dog Food Nutrient Profiles (2016) and Recommended Allowance (RA) and Safe Upper Limit in NRC (2006). The difference of nutrient criteria did not affect the results of sufficiency and excess evaluation in many nutrients but the number of recipes satisfying phosphorus, iron and choline largely differed according to the criteria. We recommend that the higher level of sufficiency criterion is basically appropriate for evaluating sufficiency of nutrient when the difference of criterial values is relatively large. We evaluated nutrient sufficiency based on metabolizable energy content calculated from Atwater factor and modified Atwater factor for companion animals using RA as criteria in the recipes, which suggested that the difference of energy conversion factor did not largely affect the results of sufficiency evaluation. We adopted some relative activities of β-carotene and vitamin D₂ to vitamin A and vitamin D₃, respectively and calculated vitamin A and vitamin D₃ contents including β-carotene as vitamin A and vitamin D₂ as vitamin D₃ in the recipes, which suggested that the large contribution of β-carotene to vitamin A nutrition but almost no contribution of vitamin D₂ to vitamin D nutrition in the recipes.