Spoiler alert, no food does. Some foods may help, but the one for your dog (or cat) is unlikely to come from a magazine article or a ‘best of’ list. 

---

There’s a lot of disingenuous marketing in the pet industry. Many brands claim their product(s) have the fix to whatever ails your pet. However, and I want you to read this: if, indeed, any one product was the antidote to a specific issue, or disease, it would be the standard of care. In fact, if it was really that good, and improved the situation so dramatically then that company would file a patent, and have invested large sums of money into clinical trials with the goal of having that product approved as a drug.

Now think about this: we don’t see pet food or supplement companies doing that, right?  No, we do not. Because we don’t see them doing this, they are also unable to make claims that their product ‘cures’, ‘treats’, ‘mitigates’, or ‘prevents’ disease. They are also not allowed to imply this, and doing so makes the folks over at the FDA and FTC cranky.

I’ve been in this industry about 15 years now, and it saddens me to report that most pet food and supplement companies spend more money on marketing than they invest into research and safety. So when a “Best Dog Food for Allergies” or a “Best Overall” food you see on social media from a ‘news’ outlet I want you to think twice.

A company could NOT say this about their own product without triggering regulatory compliance violations. So, a loophole becomes getting that product positioned in a ‘best of’ list by a journalist, in one form or another.

As a pet parent, you already do the work – much more than you would probably like to admit. You read the labels, articles, dove way deeper to a place on Reddit than you wish you knew existed. You’ve probably switched foods two or three times this year chasing an itch, or smell, or stomach that won’t settle, and we know it’s not cheap. So for some a headline or top ten list that seemingly did research feels like relief. But for pets with a longstanding issues it can just be another lap around the same block.

A rep for a pet food company (that we don’t carry) recently and rather enthusiastically emailed me a recent Forbes article asserting that this particular brand was “Best Dog Food for Allergies Overall.” Now aside from the blatant loophole of avoiding making drug claims, they further stepped in it by saying ‘this type of third-party validation can be a powerful tool for your staff when helping customers find the right food for sensitive dogs.”

Now, aside from the fact that my team or I would NEVER use a news article to help a customer pick a food, there is a lot to unpack in such a short email. It is my opinion that marketing this food as “best for allergies” even if the company did not make the claim themselves, borders on making a drug claim because they are implying that the food treats a disease (allergies). Not great. Also claiming that a newspaper article is ‘third-party validation’ is an extreme overreach. As a scientist third-party mean that the information is unbiased and scientific – and this article is neither considering the journalist is speaking from her personal experience with the food and her pet.

Inevitably I also got this forwarded to me by several friends and customers, with something to the effect of “is this legit?”. Fair question for the average pet owner. Infuriating question for someone like me, and the team at NPP.

What does the list mean?

For someone like me, I usually just roll past these headlines and roll my eyes. However, I think it’s a great example for me to highlight how these come to exist. If you scroll past the initial headline and hero imagery, Forbes tells you how they constructed this newest article. It’s a combination of staff picks, general vet commentary about limited-ingredient diets (which has no legal definition by the way), ingredient considerations, and customer feedback. As mentioned, the top pick leans on one writer feeding it to her own dog and having a great experience. I’m genuinely happy for her, however, if you know anything about me you’ll have heard me say what works for one dog will not always work for the next.

At the end of the day, this article is providing recommendations based on opinion and popularity. It’s not a scientific test. No lab work. There is no validation. No feeding trial on dogs with confirmed allergies. No laboratory tests that measure any health biomarkers. No head-to-head comparison against other foods on the market – or anything you could measure and repeat. And it certainly doesn’t tell you what worked for a dog like yours…that my friends is by design.

“Third-party validation” is a real thing. This isn’t it.

I already mentioned this, but it’s worth repeating. Validation has rules. The people validating in a situation like this should be independent from the brand. The method used should not only be written down, but transparently shared so someone else can repeat the workflow and see if they get the same results. Repeating the test, and getting the same (or highly similar) results would be true validation.

In other words, product vetting should be measured against a known and meaningful standard. Then, other experts should be double checking the work again before it’s published (this is called peer review).

So to be clear, a “best of” article clears none of that. Lifestyle writers from any media outlet, personal preferences, lists without standards, or those lacking outside review shouldn’t ever be a benchmark for picking a pets food, supplement (or yours for that matter).

Somebody gets paid, usually…

In most cases, but maybe not all, articles often earn the publisher a commission when you click and buy. The FTC regulates those links because they bend recommendations. No brand paid for the coverage, but this model still rewards big, easy-to-link brands, which describes every product on this particular list. In others, products may be part of ‘best of’ lists in one form or another in the form of what we like to call ‘Advertorials’. Advertorials are when brands pay journalists to write about their product in a positive light. These are really just long form ads made out to look like genuine journal articles, but are not. Take that for what you will.

For the record, we don’t take money from brands to write about products. We also don’t rank brands from this angle since there is no product that is best for every pet, and doing so would be disingenuous. We hold that line because the alternative is the exact thing this article is about.

Your dog’s allergies are a disease

Food reactions in dogs are a clinical condition, and the research on them is boring in the way good evidence usually is.

Among dogs seen by a vet for any reason, food-related skin reactions run about 1 to 2 percent. In other words: food allergies are RARE. The most common culprit are environmental allergens. Things like pollens, mites, fleas, and dander from other pets (it’s true – pets can even be allergic to human dander)!

Food can help dogs and cats that suffer from environmental allergies, however it’s not a magic bullet. These dogs usually require lifelong management, medicated shampoos, gut health consideration (probiotics, digestive enzymes), Omega 3’s (at the right dose), medicated baths (remove the allergens & kill yeast overgrowth), and a combination of prescription drugs in addition to special diet consideration. Allergic dermatitis is incredibly itchy, and can be painful when not well managed.

Most articles also ignore the fact that the only proven way to confirm a food allergy is an elimination diet. This means feeding one novel or hydrolyzed protein for eight to twelve weeks, then reintroduce the old food and watch for the signs to come back (Gaschen & Merchant, 2011). These can’t be determined or figured out by reading an ingredient panels. Even blood or saliva “allergy testing,” doesn’t reliably diagnose food allergies. And a lot of dogs that look like food-allergy dogs have environmental allergies instead. More common. Completely different plan.

How do you know if a food is good for allergies?

Peer-reviewed studies that run the elimination-then-rechallenge feeding protocol on defined groups of dogs would earn the right for a company to say their food is ‘good for allergies’. However, in today’s marketplace I don’t think that is even necessary. I would be happy with a company completing third party testing to ensure that their foods at least meet minimum nutrient requirements, are free of pathogens and contaminants and that they do not release their product into the marketplace until they receive that third party validation back… (see what I did there?) None of that built the Forbes list. That’s not a shot at the writer, it’s just the fact of the matter.

Dose of reality…

You don’t have to become a nutrition researcher to feed your dog well. That’s our job. Our team includes veterinary technicians with real clinical experience, and our guidance is grounded in research-level training and the actual studies, not the press release.

Food isn’t just food, it’s a tool you can use alongside many other tools. But it’s important to individualize the approach to the animal in front of you. Two dogs the same size (or even same litter) can need different things.

We don’t diagnose, treat, or replace veterinary care. We provide nutrition education and product guidance, and we work with your vet, especially when a true elimination trial is on the table.

---

References

1. Forbes Vetted. “Best Dog Food For Allergies 2026.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/article/best-dog-food-for-allergies/
2. Olivry T, Mueller RS. Critically appraised topic on adverse food reactions of companion animals (3): prevalence of cutaneous adverse food reactions in dogs and cats. BMC Vet Res. 2017;13:51. PMID 28202060. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12917-017-0973-z
3. Mueller RS, Olivry T, Prélaud P. Critically appraised topic on adverse food reactions of companion animals (2): common food allergen sources in dogs and cats. BMC Vet Res. 2016;12:9. PMID 26753610. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12917-016-0633-8
4. Mueller RS, Olivry T. Critically appraised topic on adverse food reactions of companion animals (6): prevalence of noncutaneous manifestations of adverse food reactions in dogs and cats. BMC Vet Res. 2018;14:341. PMID 30419909. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12917-018-1656-0
5. Gaschen FP, Merchant SR. Adverse food reactions in dogs and cats. Vet Clin North Am Small Anim Pract. 2011;41(2):361-79. PMID 21486641. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cvsm.2011.02.005
6. Freeman L, Becvarova I, Cave N, et al. WSAVA Nutritional Assessment Guidelines. J Small Anim Pract. 2011;52(7):385-96. PMID 21649660. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-5827.2011.01079.x
7. WSAVA Global Nutrition Committee. Global Nutrition Guidelines. https://wsava.org/global-guidelines/global-nutrition-guidelines/
8. Pet Nutrition Alliance. Manufacturer transparency resources. https://petnutritionalliance.org/
9. Federal Trade Commission. Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/disclosures-101-social-media-influencers

Right now, the industry is getting it wrong. 

---

Ingredients matter. Quality matters. That’s not up for debate. But something has gone seriously off track in how we evaluate dog and cat food, and the people getting it wrong are often the ones who care the most.

When a formula changes, what’s the first question people ask?

• Does it have fillers?
• Are there by-products

What nobody asks:

• What changed in the nutrient profile?
• Did digestibility shift?
• Are there any measurable differences in how dogs are actually doing on the food?

These questions are missing from every conversation. And that absence is doing real harm.

The List of Ingredients

When we’re talking about kibble or canned diets, we are talking about processed food. Some ingredients are processed multiple times. Processing, which includes grinding, cutting, drying, fractionating, heating, and pressure, changes the structure, digestibility, and nutrient availability of nutrients supplied by ingredients. Sometimes in a positive way, sometimes not. That is not opinion. That is established food science.

A kibble is not a list of raw ingredients. It is a formulated, processed diet designed to deliver nutrients in a specific way, and that process is complex and nearly impossible to genuinely simplify. Yet that is exactly what the industry keeps trying to do.

Two foods with similar ingredient lists can have markedly different nutrient profiles, digestibility, and biological outcomes depending on formulation, processing, and nutrient balancing. Conversely, foods with very different ingredient lists can deliver nearly identical nutritional profiles. What complicates this further, is the bioavailability of the nutrients supplied by these foods, or in other words if the pet can use those nutrients or not. This is why companion animal nutrition evaluates diets on nutrient composition and performance, not ingredient appearance alone. When we reduce evaluation to labels, we ignore the actual formulation work that determines how a diet functions in the animal.

“Filler” Is a Marketing Term. Not a Scientific One.

“Filler” and “by-product” are not scientific or regulatory classifications. They have no legal definitions. They are marketing terms, and they have been so thoroughly adopted by the independent retail channel that we now deploy them as if they constitute clinical evidence of poor nutrition. They do not.

Ingredients like starches and fibers that get reflexively dismissed as “fillers” are frequently included for defined functional reasons: stool quality, fermentation, energy delivery, and overall gastrointestinal function. In plain language, they help deliver nutrients the body needs, and without them there are health consequences. That doesn’t automatically make them ideal in every context, but it also doesn’t make them meaningless, inherently low quality, or a filler.

Take beet pulp for example. It is a moderately fermentable fiber used because it reliably supports stool consistency and colonic health. It is well-studied. It has a defined, functional role in processed pet food. The same fiber category shows up in boutique kibbles and raw toppers under names like chicory root, inulin, and pumpkin, where it gets called a prebiotic or a digestive support ingredient. The ingredient optics are just different. Is it the first ingredient I’d reach for when building a species-appropriate fresh food diet from scratch? No. But calling it a filler is not just imprecise. It is wrong. And communicating ingredients like this to pet parents as nutritional evidence of a food’s decline is a problem.

Ingredient lists also do not reflect dose, proportion, or functional contribution. An ingredient included at a physiologically meaningful level is very different from one included for label appeal, yet both appear identically on a panel. Without understanding inclusion rates and functional intent, it is not possible to determine the role an ingredient is playing in the diet. This is a fundamental limitation of label-based evaluation that is never acknowledged.

Facts About Formulation

One of the most overlooked aspects in pet nutrition is that diets are not simply collections of ingredients, but instead formulated systems. Formulation becomes more important as ingredient complexity increases. For example, whole food inclusions can introduce variability in nutrient composition, bioavailability, and balance, particularly after processing. Without careful formulation and post-processing validation, diets can miss targets for essential nutrients despite appearing high quality on paper.

This is well recognized in both human and veterinary nutrition, where nutrient adequacy, not ingredient identity, is the standard for evaluating a diet. If these outcomes are not being considered, the evaluation is incomplete regardless of how the ingredient list reads.

Ask ‘Un-spin-able’ Questions

If a food has genuinely declined in quality, that is a serious claim. It should be supported by something measurable:

• Changes in nutrient adequacy
• Shifts in digestibility
• Safety concerns backed by data
• Clinical outcomes

Without that, what we have is a store philosophy being communicated as nutritional evidence. Those are not the same thing. Conflating them is where this industry keeps losing the credibility it needs with the veterinarians and scientists who should be its allies.

Digestibility: The Forgotten Variable

Not all nutrients that are listed are utilized. Digestibility determines how much of a nutrient is absorbed and available to the animal, and this can vary significantly between ingredients and processing methods.

A diet with a cleaner ingredient list but lower digestibility may deliver fewer usable amino acids or available energy than a more processed diet with an optimized formulation. In clinical settings, highly digestible diets are often prioritized for gastrointestinal disease, recovery, and performance, not because of how the ingredient list reads, but because of how efficiently the animal can use the nutrients provided.

Without considering digestibility, ingredient-based judgments are incomplete.

The Questions We Should Ask

If we are genuinely concerned about the long-term health impact of processed diets, and there are real reasons to be, there are far more scientifically meaningful questions to be asking than whether an ingredient is labeled a by-product.

Advanced glycation end products (AGEs). These compounds form during high-heat processing, including the extrusion process used to produce kibble. Extrusion exposes ingredients to high temperature and pressure, conditions known to drive Maillard reactions and the formation of these compounds. In human nutrition, AGEs have been associated with inflammation and metabolic dysfunction. In dogs, emerging work is beginning to explore similar pathways. Yet these factors are rarely part of how foods are evaluated at the consumer level, despite being a direct consequence of processing itself.

Acrylamide. Also formed during high-heat processing, and with established health risks in human nutrition. Likewise, these are rarely discussed in the pet food retail context.

Antinutritional factors. Ingredients perceived as clean or whole are not inherently superior if they are not processed appropriately. Legumes and certain grains can contain compounds such as phytates, lectins, and protease inhibitors, which can interfere with mineral absorption and protein digestion if not addressed. In human nutrition, these are well-characterized concerns mitigated through soaking, fermenting, or cooking. In pet food, extrusion reduces some of these compounds, but not always uniformly. This raises a more meaningful question than what is on the label: how were these ingredients processed, and did that processing optimize or limit nutrient availability?

These are the questions that would move the needle on long-term pet health outcomes. They are also the questions almost entirely absent from the conversation at the consumer level, the retail level, and in a lot of influencer-driven content that passes itself off as ‘nutrition education’.

The Uncomfortable Reality for the Fresh Food Camp

I am in the fresh food camp. But there is a persistent assumption in this space that whole food or minimally processed ingredients inherently lead to better nutrition, and that assumption warrants more examination than it recieves.

We’ve swung from one extreme to another. For years, the mainstream commercial pet food establishment dismissed ingredient quality entirely. The backlash was warranted. Ingredients do matter. But we overcorrected. We started treating the ingredient list as the whole story, layered marketing language on top of it, and then communicated that to pet parents as if it were grounded in nutrition science. We built a framework where whole food automatically means better and by-product automatically means bad, without any serious consideration of food science, processing effects, formulation complexity, or measurable outcomes.

And then we used that framework to tell people their pets’ food was no longer good.

Flattening that distinction with the word “filler” doesn’t protect pets. It creates confusion, erodes trust, and generates an enormous amount of unnecessary churn for pet parents who are genuinely trying to do right by their animals.

Imagine If We Asked Different Questions?

Focusing on ingredient perception ignores one of the most practical and measurable indicators of diet quality: how the animal performs on the food. Stool quality, body condition, coat quality, and gastrointestinal tolerance are not subjective preferences. These are reflections of how well a diet is being digested and utilized.

Dogs and cats don’t respond to ingredient stories and philosophies. They respond to what the diet does in the body and how processing affects that. In clinical and research settings, outcome variables like digestibility, tolerance, metabolic response, and long-term health markers are the standard for evaluating diet performance. If a diet supports stable body condition, consistent stool quality, and overall health, that reflects functional adequacy regardless of whether the ingredient list aligns with a particular narrative.

Without incorporating outcomes, diet evaluation remains theoretical rather than physiological.

My View:

I am not a champion of ultra-processed food. The evidence for minimally processed and fresh diets, when properly formulated, is compelling and growing. I think we should be moving pet parents in that direction when we can and meeting them where they are when we can’t.

But I am not going to tell a pet parent their dog’s food is no longer good without evidence. I am not going to call beet pulp a filler because it makes for a cleaner story. And I am not going to let this industry keep making pet parents feel guilty or confused about feeding their dogs a properly formulated, nutrient-adequate processed diet because we decided that an ingredient list is more important than actual nutritional outcomes.

None of this is an argument against caring about ingredients. It is an argument for using them correctly. Ingredients are part of the picture. But in processed diets, they are not the whole picture, and in many cases, they are not the most informative part.

The question has to shift from what’s in the food? to what does the food do? Until it does, we will keep generating confusion, eroding trust, and sending pet parents on an endless loop of switching foods based on rhetoric instead of evidence.

That is not advocacy. That is the opposite of it.