Artificial Preservatives in Dog Food: Are BHA, BHT and Ethoxyquin Safe?

I compared two current dry dog-food ingredient panels before writing this. PEDIGREE Complete Nutrition Grilled Steak & Vegetable lists animal fat preserved with BHA and citric acid, with BHT and BHA appearing again later in the ingredient list. Purina Dog Chow Complete Adult Chicken takes a different route: its beef fat is preserved with mixed tocopherols. Both are ordinary supermarket dog foods, which makes the contrast more useful than comparing a budget kibble with some boutique freeze-dried product. H-E-B | Here Everything's Better The difference also explains why this topic gets messy so quickly. A shopper can look at those two labels and decide the tocopherol-preserved food feels more comfortable. That is a perfectly defensible preference. It still leaves a harder question unanswered: does the presence of BHA or BHT tell us that the food is actually unsafe for a dog? The evidence I found does not support that broad claim. Preservatives are solving a real problem Kibble of...