Nutra Nuggets Dog Food Review
I’ve reviewed pet food for over 15 years, and in that time I’ve found a handful of larger manufacturers to produce very high quality pet foods.
Diamond Pet Foods make Nutra Nuggets dog food, and that’s a good thing. I’ve fed my own dogs Taste of the Wild for many years, which is one of their most well known brands worldwide.
Consumer feedback over the years says a lot about the quality of a dog food, but what do the ingredients say?
Ingredients tell us exactly how appropriate a dog food is for our facultative carnivore dogs, so let’s take a look:
Nutra Nuggets review
There are a variety of formulas in the Nutra-Nuggets range – grain-based, grain free, puppy formula and so forth. They’re all fairly similar, so for the purpose of keeping this review simple we’ll focus on the Lamb Meal & Rice formula.
First lets look at the “main ingredients”.
There are seven ingredients before chicken fat. Why does that matter I hear you ask?
It matters because the fat content of Nutra-Nuggets is 15%. This will mostly come from chicken fat as the 8th ingredient, and I suspect the lamb meal (listed 1st) and egg product (listed 7th) as well.
You can assume everything after chicken fat is very minor, which makes those top 7 ingredients the real bulk of the dog food.
These are:
- 1 meat ingredient + 1 egg ingredient = 2 animal ingredients.
- 1 legume ingredient.
- 3 grain ingredients + 1 yeast ingredient.
What that means is there’s not as much meat as you think, even if it’s listed first, and even if it’s written in big letters on the front of the bag.
The truth appears to be more grain than anything else, plus peas to ramp up the protein a little. There’s a huge benefit of these ingredients for the manufacturer, and that’s lower production costs and bigger profit.
I estimate carbohydrates to be 42%, so approaching half of the food. Our dogs do better on protein and fat, preferably from meat.
When you account for moisture and ash, that means the beneficial part of the Nutra Nugget dog food is in the remaining 40%.
Wheat is an ingredient I consider problematic for many dogs. If you dog gets itchy on a food, gains a rotund bulky belly, or becomes a little lethargic, then most of the time I find wheat-based dog foods a cause.
Because of this reason, we can see Taste of the Wild is the much better option to the Nutra Nuggets dog food range, and I recommend looking into that instead.
There isn’t much I can say about the smaller ingredient inclusions. Flaxseed is good for heart health, skin, and coat, and it’s nice to see pre/probiotics (the “fermentation product” ingredients) – these will help your dog digest their food a little better, but in my opinion they would digest a more meat-based dog food much better even without pre/probiotics.
Overall I find Nutra-Nuggets dog food mid-range, and I’m giving it a little more credit from coming from a manufacturer I get good feedback for.
Where to buy?
A variety of stores.
Ingredients
Ingredients of Nutra Nuggets dog food (Lamb Meal & Rice Formula):
Lamb meal, peas, ground white rice, rice bran, wheat flour, dried yeast, egg product, chicken fat (preserved with mixed tocopherols), dried beet pulp, natural flavor, flaxseed, salt, potassium chloride, DL-Methionine, choline chloride, taurine, glucosamine hydrochloride, dried Lactobacillus plantarum fermentation product, dried Bacillus subtilis fermentation product, dried Lactobacillus acidophilus fermentation product, dried Enterococcus faecium fermentation product, dried Bifidobacterium animalis fermentation product, vitamin E supplement, iron proteinate, zinc proteinate, copper proteinate, ferrous sulfate, zinc sulfate, manganese sulfate, copper sulfate, potassium iodide, thiamine mononitrate, manganese proteinate, chondroitin sulfate, ascorbic acid, vitamin A supplement, biotin, niacin, calcium pantothenate, sodium selenite, pyridoxine hydrochloride, vitamin B12 supplement, riboflavin, vitamin D3 supplement, folic acid.
Guaranteed Analysis
Guaranteed analysis of Nutra Nuggets dog food (Lamb Meal & Rice Formula):
| Protein | (min) 25% |
| Fat | (min) 15% |
| Crude Fibre | (max) 3.5% |
| Carbohydrates * | Estimated 42% |
