Hi Amy! Natural Blend sure seems like a better food than Nutro, but if you want to go natural, any of the baked brands would be much healthier. We recently found out that Chester has pancreatitus, so we have changed foods and I did several days worth of research on foods and food quality. Here’s what I found out.
Most dog foods are extruded. That simply means that they are squeezed through a small tube-like machine that forces the water out of the mixture. This process destroys any flavor that the food had, even if high quality ingredients were used. Well, the manufacturers found a way to add “flavor”. All large chain restaurants have VATS of old grease, fat, and lard from cooking deep-frying, usually stored outside in containers, unrefrigerated. These chains sell this fat to the pet food manufacturers and that nasty stuff is sprayed on your dogs food. YUCK! Anytime you see chicken fat, beef fat, poultry fat, or animal fat on a list of ingredients, that’s what it is. Rancid lard. Also ingredients are listed like human food, the higher on the ingredient list, the more there is in the food. I noticed that on the Natural Blend list of ingreds, the first one is chicken meal. Chicken meal is what’s left after they remove all of the edible chicken meat from the carcass. Then they grind up the bones and the scraps of meat left on the bones and that’s chicken meal. Not very appetizing. The 4th ingred in the Natural Blend is brewers rice, that’s the small milled fragments of rice kernels that have been separated from the larger kernels of milled rice. Virtually no nutrients, just a filler like corn. The other ingreds seem very good, but you have to remember that these couple of bad ones are # 1 & # 4. They make up a large portion of the food.

We are currently feeding Wellness and our dogs LOVE it. We’re feeding the Fish & Sweet Potato, cause of Chester’s allergies. Go to their site and check it out. Wellness
You’ll see the difference in ingreds. It’s not outrageously expensive either.

Whatever you decide, just be well informed. Because the ingredients are healthy doesn’t necessarily mean the food is.