Editorial Policy

1. Purpose of This Policy

This page explains the standards BestDog.Food holds itself to when producing nutrition guides and product recommendations. It exists so readers know exactly how our content is made, checked, and corrected.

2. Our Editorial Process

• Research: Writers start from current AAFCO guidance, ingredient data, and published veterinary nutrition literature.
• Write: The writer drafts the guide, comparing products against the specific need it addresses (life stage, health condition, budget).
• Veterinary review: Clinical and safety claims are reviewed by Dr. Sanjeev Kumar, DVM, before publication.
• Publish: The guide goes live with the reviewer credited.
• Revisit: Guides are updated when formulations, recalls, or veterinary guidance change.

3. Veterinary Review

Dr. Sanjeev Kumar, DVM, is a licensed, practicing small-animal veterinarian who reviews the clinical and safety claims in our guides — for example, whether a feeding recommendation is appropriate for a given life stage or health condition. You can read his full clinical background on our author page.

4. Sourcing & Fact-Checking

Ingredient claims, AAFCO nutrient profiles, and product specifications are verified against manufacturer data and published sources before publication. Where information is uncertain at the time of writing, we say so rather than presenting a guess as fact.

5. Scope of Our Review

Dr. Kumar is a general small-animal practice veterinarian, not a board-certified veterinary nutritionist. His review covers clinical and safety claims. Ingredient-science and AAFCO-specific formulation details are additionally cross-checked by the editorial team against current published veterinary nutrition literature, since that level of nutrient-formulation specificity sits with board-certified veterinary nutritionists rather than general practice.

6. Use of AI

We use AI tools in a limited, editorial-support capacity — formatting, structured data, and research assistance on drafts a human has already written. AI does not generate nutrition recommendations or clinical claims. Full details are in our AI Disclosure.

7. Editorial Independence

BestDog.Food participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and may run advertising, as described in our Affiliate Disclosure. Neither advertising nor affiliate relationships influence the content, ratings, or recommendations in our editorial coverage. Dr. Kumar has no financial relationship with any brand we feature.

8. Corrections

Mistakes happen, and when they do, we fix them. Factual or clinical errors are corrected as soon as we’re made aware of them. Our full process is on our Corrections Policy page.

9. Keeping Guides Current

Product formulations, recalls, and availability change often. We periodically revisit older guides and update them when the underlying facts change.

10. Contact & Feedback

If you’ve spotted something that looks wrong, or have feedback on our editorial standards, we want to hear it:

11. Why This Policy Is Public

Most sites keep their editorial standards internal, if they’ve written them down at all. We publish ours because a standard nobody can see isn’t one a reader can hold us to. If we ever fall short of what’s written here, that’s grounds to call it out.

12. What “Veterinary-Reviewed” Actually Means on This Site

We use that phrase carefully, not decoratively. “Veterinary-reviewed” means Dr. Kumar personally evaluated the clinical and safety claims in a specific guide before it published — not that a veterinarian was consulted once in general, or that the phrase appears somewhere on the site as a trust badge. If a guide doesn’t carry his review credit, treat its clinical claims with the same caution you’d apply to any general pet-content site, and check with your own veterinarian before acting on it.