Iams Advanced Nutrition Sensitive Digestion Adult All Breed review

Of all the Advanced Nutrition recipes this is the one that climbs into our Good band, the same band where the typical adult dry food comes to rest.

The extras earn the gap. It carries the largest dried meat declaration in the range, a fibre and prebiotic set aimed squarely at the gut, and butyrate delivered inside a coating so that it survives the trip through the stomach. Estimated carbohydrate at 46.4% of dry matter is effectively level with the 46.2% typical. Starch is not carrying anything here that it should not.

Ingredients, as declared: dried chicken and turkey 29% (including chicken 17%), maize, white rice (14%), barley, poultry fat, turkey meat (4%), dried beet pulp (2.5%), chicken gravy, minerals (including 0.35% sodium hexametaphosphate), linseed, salmon oil, dried brewer's yeast, mannanoligosaccharides (0.5%), fructooligosaccharides (0.2%), microencapsulated Sodium Butyrate (0.1%).

The Advanced Nutrition line has no bigger meat declaration than this one. Dried chicken and turkey come to 29%, chicken alone to 17%, and turkey meat adds 4% on top. Protein converts to 28.3% of dry matter and fat to 16.3%, a comfortable everyday balance for an adult dog of any size.

White rice at 14% is the choice that gives the recipe its name. Rice is the cereal most often reached for when a gut needs settling, because it breaks down easily and asks very little of the digestion, and maize and barley sit alongside it in support. Estimated carbohydrate lands at 46.4% of dry matter, right on the usual mark for an adult dry food.

The digestive work happens in the last few lines. Two prebiotic fibres go in, mannanoligosaccharides at 0.5% and fructooligosaccharides at 0.2%, and both feed the bacteria you want living in the large intestine. Sodium butyrate at 0.1% is the interesting one: butyrate is what those bacteria make when they ferment fibre, and it is the preferred fuel of the cells lining the colon. Microencapsulating it is what gets it past the stomach intact.

Salmon oil provides the marine omega 3s, linseed the plant form. That is a sensible pairing on a food for dogs whose skin tends to flare when digestion is unsettled. Dried brewer's yeast brings B vitamins and a little extra protein. Dried beet pulp at 2.5% supplies the fibre that gives a stool its shape.

A careful reader will stop on poultry fat. It is a perfectly serviceable fat, but the word poultry stretches across chicken, turkey, duck and goose, so the label stops short of naming the bird. Every other animal ingredient is named. That makes this a small gap and not a hole, and it only matters if you need to rule a specific bird in or out.

£2.67 a kilo, sold as a 2kg bag.

For a 15kg adult in moderate condition the maths lands at about £0.61 a day, taking daily energy at roughly 840 kcal from the standard 110 × bodyweight^0.75 maintenance estimate. The label's own table asks 215 grams a day for that dog, a little under the 228 grams our estimate suggests.