Rocco Diet Care Weight Control: Beef & Chicken review

Two recipes carry the weight control name, one on beef and chicken, the other on chicken with potato. As with the rest of Rocco's Diet Care tins there is no itemised ingredient list published beneath the name, so what the recipes are called is what you have to work with.

That is worth knowing if a meat is being avoided. The beef tin names two animals in its title and the chicken tin names one with a vegetable behind it, and nothing else is either confirmed or excluded in print. Your practice or the maker can supply the full declaration when there is something specific to check.

L-carnitine is dosed at 500mg in both, printed rather than implied. The amino acid has a hand in how the body moves fat about, so makers reach for extra of it in slimming recipes. Here at least the amount is visible. The rest of each panel runs to vitamin D3 at 200 IU, biotin at 300mcg, zinc at 25mg, manganese at 1.4mg and iodine at 0.75mg, with vitamin E in both. The two labels differ over how vitamin E is expressed and over whether copper appears at all.

Both tins are heavily diluted with moisture and kept low in fat. The energy in each 100g falls well under an ordinary wet food, so the bowl has to be larger to meet the same dog's needs. That is the working principle of a weight diet rather than a thin recipe, and your vet is the one to set the target and say whether these tins get you there.

Beef and chicken lead this one together. Protein is declared at 10.8% as fed, a high figure for something out of a tin, and against 78.0% moisture that becomes 49.1% of dry matter, while fat at 4.5% converts to 20.5%. Crude fibre reads 2.2% as fed and 10.0% dry, ash 10.5% and the carbohydrate estimate 9.9%, with energy at 80 kcal per 100g. Its panel gives vitamin E by weight at 20mg and lists no copper at all, and the carnitine entry is spelled in the German form on the label.

The beef recipe is sold as 400g and 800g units in packs of 6 and 24, at £3.38 a kilo. The chicken recipe adds a pack of 12 at 800g and works out at £2.84 a kilo. Because both are so light on energy the portions run large. An energy estimate for a 15kg dog puts the beef tin at around 1050g a day and the chicken one at about 1377g, which comes to roughly £3.55 and £3.91 respectively.