Beneful Dog Food Review
A bag of Purina Beneful reads like a wonderfully “healthy” choice for your dog, but is it?
It’s a brand I find popular with small breed dog owners, and being a glossy bag on the shelves of Woolworths seems to offer trust – I often hear “If it’s not healthy, Woolworths wouldn’t sell it, would they?” or words to that affect, but is it healthy? (You’ll find out in this review!)
For the sake of this review we’ll take a look at the “Beneful Healthy Small Bites With Beef” recipe (there’s that word “healthy” again), and find out if it truly is a good dog food for the dog you love so much.
Related: Best rated affordable dog foods.
Purina Beneful Review
Can you believe I first reviewed Purina Beneful in 2013?
Back then there were a lot of claims (mostly in the US) that Beneful was “killing dogs”. My experience has taught me these things are very hard to prove, so the best information I can give you as a certified pet nutritionist is whether the recipe is healthy, so let’s do that.
To truly understand if a dog food is good for our dogs, we need to consider what our dogs are. We tend to see them as furry family members, but forget the truth – they’re predators who we’ve adopted and domesticated.
We’re told our dogs are omnivores, like us, but in reality they’re nothing like us.
Your dog has much more in common with factual carnivores, such as the domestic cat (which we also inappropriately feed as if they’re omnivores). Despite being our cute domestic pets, they still very much resemble their ancestors – wolves.
Based on those facts, what do you think your dog should eat?
Prey? Flesh, organs, raw meaty bones, fur, feathers, and all that yucky stuff?
Or processed hard nuggets of grains and by-products of grains which couldn’t be packaged and sold as “human food”?
Yes, the answer is the first one. It makes sense, right? Even if we forget that’s the case.
The pet food industry, however, would rather you fed your dog the latter – cheaply made processed kibble – and they are cheeky enough to tell you it’s “healthy”.
Ok, let’s take a look at the ingredients of Purina Beneful (Healthy Small Bites with Beef)…
Firstly, when we see the word with in a recipe name, it means there isn’t much of that ingredient in the dog food.
The first and main ingredient is wholegrain cereals and/or cereal by-products. That’s not ideal for your meat-lovin’ predator pooch, is it now?
It makes you wonder what all the claims of “health” are for, as this ingredient alone will likely result in your dog being overweight, lethargic, a shadow of their potential self, and likely not the healthiest of dogs a few years down the line when they fall victim of “bad luck”.
Still keen on Beneful?
You may have guessed I’m not a fan…
Thankfully the second ingredient is more appropriate for your dog – meat & meat by-products.
We can hope this is a quality inclusion of meat and organs, but really as an ambiguous ingredient it could be chicken heads for all we know.
How do we know it’s a nice mix of healthy meats and organs?
We don’t.
Even though it’s the 2nd ingredient, the 3rd ingredient might be in the same amount, and that’s some ambiguous concoction of vegetable and vegetable by-products. The ingredients probably could’ve been written as 1. Cereal concoction, 2. Vegetable concoction, and then 3. Some ambiguous meat concoction. But that would sound even less ideal to those who see their dog as a meat-eating mammal.
On the subject of vegetable by-products, pause for a moment and ask yourself what a “by-product” of a vegetable actually is?
Carrot tops?
Potato skin?
Something which would otherwise be dumped on landfill?
It doesn’t get much better with the 4th ingredient being sugar. We tend to know sugar is bad for our health, but that’s our choice – but why force sugar on our dogs?
Sugar, combined with humectant as the 5th ingredient, may encourage your dog to eat something they may otherwise turn their nose up, in a similar way they may turn their nose up if you stuck a blade of wheat in their face. After all, as pet owners we assume a dog food is great if our dog laps it up – don’t we?
Kids lap up ice-cream, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. It means it’s full of sugar and other unhealthy stuff kids love (sugar is a drug, right?).
So, is there anything good to say about Purina Beneful, other than how great the price seems to be?
Well, no, not really.
If the ingredients mentioned above haven’t put you off, let’s end with an ingredient we all know is bad (and pointless for a dog), and that’s food colours.
Let’s end the Beneful review here, and if you’ve got this far I’d like to ask a favour – leave me a comment to say you’ve read it to the end, and thank me for giving you the information you need to feed your dog a much healthier diet than this (because I hope that’s what you do!)
Ingredients
The ingredients of Beneful dog food (Beneful Healthy Small Bites With Beef):
Wholegrain Cereals and/or Cereal By-Products; Meat & Meat By-Products (Poultry, Beef, and/or Lamb) and/or Poultry By-Product; Vegetable & Vegetable By-Products; Sugar, Humectant; Orthophosphoric Acid, Sorbic Acid, Calcium Propionate, Emulsifier; Minerals, Vitamins and/or Amino Acids, Antioxidants, Natural Flavours; Food Colours.
