I've been looking up dog nutrition a lot recently as i am fed up with some of the junk that is in a lot of the kibble (dry food) at the moment.
From what i have learned you can get a basic idea of how good a food is by looking at the first 5 ingredients listed. The first ingredient should be a meat or meat meal. After that you preferably don't want to see 3 grain based items such as wheat, oat etc etc as then the content of grain is higher than meat (2 or 3 more meat products are preferable).
Also you want to stay away from any food that has corn (or corn products) anywhere in the ingredients as corn is one of the top causes of allergies in dogs. Some people also believe Soybean products cause many allergies in dogs (although i don't think a direct connection has been proven as yet, better safe than sorry
).
Finally it is generally thought best to stay away from products with 'by-product' on unspecific animal content in them (such as lamb by-product meal or animal fat) as they are seen to contain very inconsistent ingredients because of the multiple sources they come from. Also animal by-product is much cheaper than real meat.
So you really want to stay away form a food that has Ground Whole Corn, Chicken By-Product Meal, Rice, Corn Meal, Animal Fat as the top 5 ingredients.
A food that has Lamb meal, Rice, Rice Flour, Rice Meal, Chicken fat as the first 5 ingredients probably isn't the greatest food in the world either.
Finally a food containing chicken meal, turkey meal, lamb, potatoes, peas, chicken fat as the top 5 should be pretty decent.
I think there are a lot of other factors that go into what makes a good food vs a bad food, also very important is protein content but i haven't really got that far into my research as yet.
As for raw food diets, they can be much much much better for dogs than any kibble could ever be, but i think it is a lot of work to formulate a sufficiently balanced diet at home making it impractical for most people.
Either way i think most information you would need to know about nutrition for dogs can be found online, its just sometimes hard to tell what is factual and what is someone trying to sell something.
If i have made any errors in what i said, please correct me as i am very interested in learning as much as i can about dog nutrition and don't want to have started off with the completely wrong idea
.
I'm off to read the links you posted on nutrition now and thanks also for the authors names (study study study, like being back in college
).