The Power of Fiber
Fiber provides pets with several vital benefits:
Pets with healthy guts don't require pet parents to take them outside too often for relief, and pet parents appreciate that cleaning up after their pets is easy. When pets display unsatisfactory defecation, pet parents tend to blame the pet food, making proper fiber inclusion rates paramount.
Trouw Nutrition believes in the power of properly formulated dietary fibers, which is why we invested in expertise and analytical testing to develop an extensive ingredient database to assist customers with custom mixing and application of feed ingredients into their pet diet formulations.
This in-depth dietary fiber database consists of detailed composition data of over 75 ingredients. These ingredients will promote the growth and diversification of the pet’s microbiota. This knowledge enables Trouw Nutrition to test, adjust, and include the precise blend of dietary fibers to promote the growth and diversification of the microbiome while maintaining satisfactory, consistent stool quality.
Step 1: Trouw Nutrition and your company agree to the Life Fiber Technology NDA that details the necessary business and privacy terms of your relationship with Trouw Nutrition.
Step 2: You send your selected formulations to Trouw Nutrition’s nutritionist for review. The expert then evaluates the formulation in our nutritional model to determine the dietary type and quantity.
Step 3: Adjustments are made to meet the optimized targets.
Step 4: The formula is returned to the customer for a complete nutritional review and approval.
Step 5: After diets are approved, per the Life Fiber Technology agreement, your company is required to purchase any recommended ingredients under 3% inclusion from Trouw Nutrition.
Fiber provides pets with several vital benefits:
The Science behind Fiber
Multiple methods exist for measuring the different types of fiber, but not one analytical methodology encompasses all the necessary considerations for formulating diets.
Crude fiber refers to the indigestible fractions of a feedstuff. As the name suggests, measuring fiber by this methodology is crude. This approach accounts for most of the cellulose but only a portion of the hemicellulose and lignin, resulting in underestimations of the true fiber content. Crude fiber does not account for the soluble fibers in an ingredient and provides little information about the functionality and fermentability of that ingredient or feed. Unfortunately, this method and label guarantee are still used to this day.
Dietary fiber, on the other hand, better aligns with new Food and Drug Administration’s regulations and provides more meaningful information to pet parents. The dietary fiber method measures both insoluble and soluble fibers, reflecting a much more accurate representation of the total dietary fiber.
Insoluble dietary fiber refers to plant cellulose and hemicellulose, which affect stool firmness, help move digesta, and create balance in the intestine, thereby improving stool quality.
Soluble dietary fiber refers to plant pectin and gums, which help nurture optimal intestinal health and serve as an intestinal pH modulator.
Too much insoluble dietary fiber can result in excessive stool volume, and too much soluble dietary fiber can cause loose stools and flatulence. A balance between the two must be achieved for optimal intestinal health and performance.
The health benefits provided by fiber stem from their nourishment of the gut microbiota, the microorganisms living in the pet’s digestive tract. Microbiota thrive on a diversified diet, ideally provided by a healthy balance of dietary fiber.
Each source of dietary fiber serves a unique function and only through providing the proper blend at select quantities can optimal gut conditions for promoting pet health and well-being and consumer-acceptable stool quality be achieved.
Begin formulating your pet food diet for optimal fiber performance through our Life Fiber Technology program.
