Canned applause: canned foods offer several health advantages over kibble products.(NUTRITION)

How should you choose a canned food for your dog? To start, by looking past its advertising in dog magazines or its front label. We suggest you focus on its ingredient panel, its guaranteed analysis (GA), and finally, on its performance in feeding trials with your dog.

Here is why you have to work a little to find the right food for your dog.

Good ideas get replicated quickly in any competitive market. Products that demonstrate any increased sales performance or popularity are copied and aggressively promoted against the originals.

The pet food market is no different. As products that contain top-quality muscle meats, whole grains, and healthy vegetables become increasingly popular, more and more of these foods are offered. That's great news for our dogs.

The bad news is that along with the increase in genuinely superior products comes an increase in superficially (or artificially) superior products--foods that really aren't all that good. That's where the marketing department comes in! With glossy studio shots of succulent meats, earthy grains, and fresh, ripe vegetables, professional portraits of flawlessly fit, clean dogs, and a sprinkling of ambiguous verbiage, any dog food can appear to compete with the healthiest products on the market. Especially if you add nominal amounts of the latest "fad" ingredients, blueberries, say, or pomegranate juice, to the product formula.

We beg you to put the advertising aside and consider the ingredients themselves.

What's in the can?