Pet-food calories are declared per unit of Metabolisable Energy (ME), not as human 'Calories'
The text below is reproduced verbatim from the first-hand source (FEDIAF Nutritional Guidelines 2025).
> Unit per 1000 kcal of metabolisable energy (ME) > Unit per MJ of metabolisable energy (ME) > Recommended nutrient levels for complete dog food: unit per MJ of metabolisable energy (ME)
Source: pdf-raw/fediaf-historical/fediaf_nutritional_guidelines_2025.txt (first-hand official guidelines, whitespace-normalised for C1 matching).
Claims (verified C1 substrings of source_file)
Unit per 1000 kcal of metabolisable energy (ME)Unit per MJ of metabolisable energy (ME)Recommended nutrient levels for complete dog food: unit per MJ of metabolisable energy (ME)
Analysis — is pet-food energy the same as human food energy? (not a C1 claim)
No. Pet food is expressed on an ME (metabolisable energy) basis — declared "per 1000 kcal of ME" or "per MJ of ME" (verbatim above) — and pet energy is estimated with the modified Atwater method (species-specific for dogs and cats; see the companion topic). Human food "Calories" on nutrition labels are computed with the general Atwater factors (~4 kcal/g protein, 9 kcal/g fat, 4 kcal/g carbohydrate) and declared per serving or per 100 g. Because the energy basis (ME vs gross metabolisable energy for humans) and the conversion factors differ, a pet-food calorie figure is not directly interchangeable with a human-food calorie figure. The human-side general Atwater figures above are standard nutrition methodology cited here as background; no first-hand human-side official source was reachable in this session, so they are presented as analysis, not as C1-verified claims.