the Honest Kitchen WHOLE FOOD CLUSTERS DOG FOOD Review

With an average score of 5.3, The Honest Kitchen’s Whole Food Clusters line is considered a moderate risk food and Honest Kitchen’s lowest scoring line. This food has a moderate amount of carbohydrate, averaging about 35%. Low carbohydrate foods are preferable since large amounts of starch or carbohydrate can increase insulin levels and cause unwanted changes to the gut microbiome.  

Like all Honest Kitchen foods, the ingredients are supplemented with more than 5 vitamins and minerals, which indicates lower quality or incomplete ingredients. Vitamin and mineral excesses, especially vitamin D and copper can often result from added vitamin premixes, so it’s preferable that most or all vitamins and minerals come from real foods.  

Some of the foods in this line also lose ingredient quality points for multiple added amino acids. Since meat is a more complete source of protein, added amino acids may indicated the use of less complete plant based proteins.    

The food is cold pressed, which is considered minimally processed compared to canned and kibble. Minimal or no processing is preferred since heating foods causes losses in some active enzymes, amino acids and phytonutrients. 

The food safety scores of this line are fairly low since all of the foods in the Whole Food Clusters line contain high pesticide foods in the top 5 ingredients. This is typically potatoes, oats, peas and lentils.  The food contains natural flavor, which is a low quality ingredient that’s often animal digest or MSG, which are low quality ingredients with limited safety studies. Genetically modified ingredients also make a regular appearance, sometimes in the top 5 ingredients as potatoes, or further down the ingredient list as apples.  

The Honest Kitchen’s Whole Food Clusters contains salmon oil, which is preferable to generic fish oil as a source of EPA/DHA. However it doesn’t specify whether the salmon is farmed or wild caught. The food also doesn’t reveal the omega6:omega-3 ratio, which is unfortunate since AAFCO allows a very inflammatory limit of 30:1. 

Some of the foods also contain coconut oil, which may cause gut inflammation and unwanted gut bacteria changes.