Are biscuits bad for dogs? The arithmetic on three Indian biscuit labels

What is actually in a glucose biscuit

A glucose biscuit is refined wheat flour, sugar, palm oil and salt, and its own pack declares the amounts: 454 kcal, 6.9 g of protein, 77.3 g of carbohydrate of which 25.0 g is added sugar, 13.0 g of fat of which 6.0 g is saturated, and 296 mg of sodium in every 100 g.

Those are not estimates. Indian law puts that panel on the packet. Under the Food Safety and Standards (Labelling and Display) Regulations, nutritional information per 100 g or 100 ml or per single consumption pack of the product shall be given on the label, and the list that follows names energy value in kilocalories, protein, carbohydrate and total sugars, added sugars, total fat, saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol and sodium. Every biscuit sold in India therefore carries its own answer to this question, printed on the back, and almost nobody turns the packet over.

The ingredient list on the glucose biscuit runs refined wheat flour (maida) at 68 percent, sugar, refined palm oil, invert sugar syrup, iodised salt, raising agents, milk solids, a flour treatment agent, an emulsifier and artificial vanilla flavour. Read it as a recipe for cheap, shelf-stable energy, because that is what it was designed to be. Nothing in it was chosen for a dog.

The Marie biscuit is not the safer option

This is the first thing the labels overturn. Indian pages recommending a biscuit almost always recommend Marie, and one ranking page states flatly that Marie biscuits are one of the safest options if you are giving a human biscuit to your dog, because they are light and not too sweet. A veterinary chain's page says plain unflavoured biscuits like Marie are not toxic to dogs in small amounts.

Put the two panels side by side and the gap is 9 kilocalories per 100 g, which is 2 percent. The Marie biscuit carries 4.2 g less added sugar and 2.4 g less fat per 100 g, and 20 mg more sodium Declared pack nutrition panel…. For a dog, whose problem with a biscuit is energy rather than flavour, swapping the glucose biscuit for the Marie changes the arithmetic by about one part in fifty. It feels like a concession and it is not one.

The cream biscuit is the genuinely different one, and it is different in the wrong direction: 492 kcal per 100 g, 34.8 g of added sugar, 19.9 g of fat, and 4.7 g of protein, the lowest of the three. It also carries 1.5 percent cocoa solids, which matters for a separate reason covered further down.

Why no Indian pack tells you what one biscuit weighs

Nobody hands a dog 100 grams of biscuit. They hand it a biscuit, and the three packs read for this page declare their serving size three different ways. The glucose biscuit gives 15 g and no biscuit count. The Marie pack gives approximately 3 biscuits and no gram figure. The cream biscuit gives approximately 10 g, approximately 1 biscuit, which is the only one of the three a reader can convert Declared pack nutrition panel….

So there is no honest national figure for the calories in one biscuit, and this page does not invent one. It works in grams and in declared pack weight instead, which are the two numbers you can actually check. Put the packet on a kitchen scale once, divide by the number of biscuits in it, and you will never need to do it again for that brand.

How much of a dog's daily energy a packet really is

One 45 g packet of glucose biscuits carries 204 kilocalories, which is 58 to 73 percent of a 5 kg dog's entire daily energy, 35 to 43 percent of a 10 kg dog's and 15 to 19 percent of a 30 kg dog's.

Those daily figures are published rather than guessed. The World Small Animal Veterinary Association's chart gives 280 to 351 kcal a day at 5 kg, 470 to 590 at 10 kg, 790 to 993 at 20 kg and 1,080 to 1,346 at 30 kg, calculated from the 2006 National Research Council maintenance equations at 130 kcal and 95 kcal times body weight to the power 0.75. The low end of each range is the inactive adult. A flat dog in Mumbai or Bengaluru walked once a day sits there, so use the lower number.

The other half of the calculation is the treat ceiling, which is 10 percent of the day's calories. That is the figure this site uses throughout and the reason it matters here is that a biscuit is a treat in nutritional terms however it is served, including when it is served instead of breakfast.

Read the fourth column, because it is the one that changes behaviour. A 5 kg Pomeranian or Indian Spitz has a whole day's treat allowance of six to eight grams of biscuit. That is less than a fifth of the smallest packet sold. A 30 kg Labrador, the largest dog most Indian households keep, has a daily allowance of under 30 grams, which is two thirds of that same small packet.

The habit that produces an overweight dog is not a packet. It is two biscuits with morning tea, one when someone comes home, one at the door in the evening and one because the dog looked at somebody. Nobody in that house thinks they fed the dog anything.

Run it for the packet in your hand

1. Read the net weight on the packet, which Indian law requires to be there, and the energy per 100 g from the nutrition panel on the back.
2. Multiply the energy per 100 g by the pack weight and divide by 100. A 45 g packet at 454 kcal per 100 g is 204 kcal.
3. Find your dog's daily energy on the published chart, using its ideal weight rather than its current weight.
4. Take 10 percent of the lower figure, which is the realistic treat budget for a dog walked once a day.
5. Divide that budget by the biscuit's energy per gram to get the grams you are allowed, then weigh them once so you know what they look like.
6. Subtract those calories from the dog's main meal the same day rather than adding them to it.

If that arithmetic produces a number you cannot work with, the portioning is a bigger question than a biscuit and the dog diet chart for India runs it across weights and foods.

The protein that is not in there

A glucose biscuit carries 15.2 g of protein per 1,000 kilocalories, against a published minimum of 45 g per 1,000 kilocalories for an adult dog's diet, so a biscuit supplies about a third of the protein density a dog's food is required to hold.

Per 1,000 kcal is the unit that matters, and it is the unit almost nobody uses. The Merck Veterinary Manual states that adult dogs require a minimum of 18 percent protein as dry matter or 45 grams per 1,000 kcal ME under the AAFCO guidelines. Work the three biscuit panels against that and the picture is consistent: 15.2 g per 1,000 kcal for the glucose biscuit, 17.8 for the Marie and 9.6 for the cream biscuit, or 34, 39 and 21 percent of the minimum Declared pack nutrition panel… Declared pack nutrition panel….

Two published figures disagree here and we are printing both rather than choosing. The same Merck page gives the NRC requirement separately as about 20 g of protein per 1,000 kcal of ME, which is less than half the AAFCO minimum. The two bodies are answering slightly different questions, one setting a formulation floor for a complete food and the other a physiological requirement. The useful point is that a glucose biscuit at 15.2 g per 1,000 kcal sits below the lower of the two as well as the higher, so the conclusion does not depend on which one you prefer.

The egg row is the one to hold on to. A whole hen egg measures 143 kcal, 12.6 g of protein, 9.51 g of fat, 0.72 g of carbohydrate, 56 mg of calcium and 198 mg of phosphorus per 100 g. Per calorie it carries about six times the protein of a glucose biscuit, and it brings calcium and phosphorus that the biscuit does not list at all.

This is what empty calories means, stated as a number rather than a slogan. The energy in a biscuit is real and usable. What is missing is everything a dog's body has to build with, and the energy is what makes the gap worse. A biscuit displaces the food that was carrying the rest, so a dog that has filled a third of its day with biscuit has a third less room for everything it actually needed.

Displacement is the whole argument, and it is the argument the one competitor page that reaches for it never completes. A fresh dog food brand's page on this exact question names nutritional displacement correctly, cites the 10 percent guidance, and then gives no calorie figure, no gram figure and no protein figure anywhere on the page before recommending its own product. Naming the mechanism without the arithmetic leaves the reader exactly where they started.

What 25 grams of added sugar per 100 g means for a dog

Twenty five grams of added sugar per 100 g means 22 percent of the biscuit's energy is sugar, and that one 45 g packet puts 45 kilocalories of pure sugar into a dog that has no dietary requirement for any of it.

Start with the requirement, because it settles the question. Dietary carbohydrates are not considered essential nutrients in the diet for adult, nonreproducing dogs and cats. There is no canine recommended intake for added sugar to compare a biscuit against, because there is nothing to recommend. Any benchmark here has to be borrowed, and we are saying so plainly rather than inventing a canine number.

The honest borrowed benchmark is India's own. The ICMR-National Institute of Nutrition's Dietary Guidelines for Indians state that sugar should be less than 5 percent of the total energy per day for adults, and that there should be no added sugar for children under 2 years old. Run a 45 g packet against that human ceiling and the result is uncomfortable.

• For a 5 kg dog, one packet is 13 to 16 percent of the day's energy as added sugar, about 2.6 to 3.2 times the share India's guidelines allow an adult human.
• For a 10 kg dog, it is 8 to 10 percent, about 1.5 to 1.9 times that share.
• For a 20 kg dog, it is 5 to 6 percent, which lands at roughly the human ceiling.
• For a 30 kg dog, it is 3 to 4 percent, which is the only case that stays under it.

Treat those multiples as a sense of scale rather than a diagnosis, because they apply a human guideline to an animal. What they do establish is that the usual defence, that one small packet cannot matter, is a claim about a 30 kg dog being used to justify feeding a 5 kg one.

Two Indian official numbers that do not agree

India publishes two different sugar benchmarks and a reader can meet both on the same afternoon. The labelling regulation calculates the per-serve percentage contribution on a reference adult day of 2,000 kcal that allows 50 g of added sugar, which is 10 percent of energy. The national dietary guidelines say sugar should be less than 5 percent of total energy per day, which at 2,000 kcal is about 25 g. The figure printed on the packet is therefore calculated against a ceiling twice as generous as the one India's own nutrition institute recommends.

We have used the 5 percent guideline above because it is the more conservative, and we are publishing the discrepancy rather than quietly picking the one that made the better sentence. For a dog neither number is binding. For a reader checking a packet, knowing that the percentage on the label is measured against the looser of the two is worth more than either figure alone.

The same guidelines name the category directly. Among the foods they ask Indians to restrict, listed under high fat, sugar and salt and ultra-processed foods, are sauces, cheese, mayonnaise, jams, fruit pulps, juices, carbonated beverages, biscuits, cookies, cakes, pastries and breakfast cereals. India's national dietary guidance puts biscuits on the restrict list for people. The dog is smaller than the person.

Sugar and your dog's teeth, the accurate version

Sugar does not rot a dog's teeth the way it rots yours, and the reason is published: dental caries was found in 5.25 percent of adult canine patients, against a disease that affects most adult humans, because a dog's mouth is built differently.

Four differences explain the gap, and they come from the only veterinary review devoted to the question. Dogs have conical teeth with wider gaps between them, so there is less room for food to lodge and stagnate. Dog saliva is more alkaline, with a mean pH of 7.5 against 6.5 in humans, which buffers bacterial acid. Dogs have relatively low salivary amylase, so starch left around the teeth breaks down more slowly. And a dog's ordinary diet contains little fermentable carbohydrate.

Hold that last clause, because it is the one a biscuit changes. The same review states that a diet high in highly refined and easily fermentable carbohydrates will favour the development of caries, and that food high in carbohydrates trapped in occlusal pits, with enough bacteria present, makes caries very likely to develop. A soft biscuit paste pressed into the grooves of a molar is the exact condition described.

So the accurate statement is narrower than the one the search results give you, and more useful. Google's AI Overview for this query, captured on 21 October 2026, says regular consumption of sugary biscuits increases the risk of diabetes, tooth decay and gum disease, and one clinic page on the sugar query describes bacteria producing acids that damage enamel, which is the human caries model transplanted whole. Caries in dogs is uncommon and a biscuit habit raises its odds. Those are both true and they are not the same sentence.

One practical consequence follows, and it is the opposite of what the biscuit aisle implies. A retailer ranking in the top three for this query states that dog cookies can offer dental benefits. A hard biscuit is not a toothbrush, it shatters rather than scrapes, and nothing on these three labels was formulated with a dental claim behind it. If teeth are the concern, the answer is a brush, not a different biscuit.

Why nobody notices, and the Indian numbers that show it

Nobody notices because the harm is slow and because owners do not see it. In 500 healthy adult dogs screened at a veterinary hospital in Ludhiana, 36 percent were overweight or obese, and 101 of the 180 affected owners, 56.11 percent, still considered their pet to be in an ideal body weight category after the scoring chart had been explained to them.

That study is the best Indian denominator on this question and it points straight at treats. Of the 180 overweight and obese dogs, 161 (89.44 percent) were given treats and snacks regularly in addition to their normal feed, against 11 of 70 normal-weight dogs (15.71 percent), a difference the authors report at chi-square 128.34 with p below 0.0001. Table scraps showed the same pattern, 113 of 180 (62.77 percent) against 3 of 70 (4.29 percent).

The breed figures locate the problem in exactly the households most likely to have a biscuit tin. Obesity prevalence was highest in Labrador Retrievers at 55.55 percent, followed by Pugs at 18.89 percent and Beagles at 8.33 percent, and 55.55 percent of the overweight dogs were fed only home-cooked food while 2.22 percent were on commercial food alone.

Treats are an association in that data rather than a proven cause, and the study was run on dogs presented at a clinic rather than on a random sample of Indian dogs. Both limits matter and neither rescues the biscuit. An odds pattern that strong, in the direction the energy arithmetic predicts, is as close to a confirmation as a cross-sectional survey gets.

The conditions that follow are covered properly elsewhere on this site rather than summarised here. Our pages on obesity in dogs and cats, diabetes in dogs and cats and pancreatitis in dogs carry the diagnosis, the Indian caseload and the costs. What this page adds is the number on the front of that chain, which is how many kilocalories a biscuit habit is actually delivering.

One Indian detail belongs here because it changes the dose. A packet left open on a shelf through a humid monsoon week in Mumbai, Chennai or Kolkata goes soft, and a soft biscuit is not thrown away in most households, it is given to the dog. The open packet by the door is not a measured portion and nobody treats it as one.

Salt and palm oil: one scare is overstated, one is not

The salt scare is overstated and the fat is not. A 45 g packet carries 133 mg of sodium, about 0.33 g of salt, against the 20 to 30 g that would produce clinical signs of salt toxicosis in a 10 kg dog, while the same packet carries 5.9 g of fat of which 2.7 g is saturated.

Take the salt first, because it is the claim most often repeated and least often checked. Merck's position is that the acute oral lethal dose of salt in dogs is about 4 g per kg and that clinical signs of toxicosis can appear after ingestion of 2 to 3 g per kg, and it adds the condition that matters most: salt toxicosis is unlikely to occur as long as sodium-regulating mechanisms are intact and fresh drinking water is available. For a 10 kg dog the signs threshold is 20 to 30 g of salt in one sitting. A packet of biscuits carries under 2 percent of that.

Google's AI Overview for this query, captured on 21 October 2026, says dogs are very sensitive to sodium and that excess salt can cause vomiting, diarrhoea, excessive thirst or even seizures. Measured against the packet in a reader's hand, that is three orders of magnitude out. Saying so matters, because a reader who is told a biscuit might cause seizures and then watches their dog eat one with no effect learns to discount the whole page, including the parts that are right.

What is true about the sodium is a density question rather than a poisoning one. At 296 mg per 100 g against 454 kcal, a glucose biscuit works out at 652 mg of sodium per 1,000 kcal, which is above the density an adult dog's food needs to carry. That is a chronic-load argument about the whole bowl, and our roti page already sets a dog's published sodium minimum against measured Indian intake. Read it there.

The palm oil is the part worth the worry

Refined palm oil is the third ingredient by weight on the glucose biscuit and the saturated fat it supplies is declared: 6.0 g per 100 g, which is 46 percent of the biscuit's total fat. The cream biscuit, made with refined palm and palmolein oil, declares 19.9 g of fat of which 9.8 g is saturated. All three packs declare trans fat at 0 g.

The number to carry is per 1,000 kcal, because that is how a veterinary fat limit is written. The glucose biscuit works out at 29 g of fat per 1,000 kcal and the cream biscuit at 40. Both sit above the under 20 g per 1,000 kcal that is specified for a dog being managed for pancreatitis, which is a figure our guide to Indian food for dogs sets out in full. For a dog with a history, the biscuit is not a neutral item.

The biscuits that are genuinely dangerous

Four kinds of biscuit are a different category from everything above, because they can injure a dog rather than merely feed it badly. Each is listed below with the page that carries the dose.

• Chocolate and cocoa biscuits. Theobromine is dose-dependent on body weight and cocoa content. The cream biscuit read for this page declares 1.5 percent cocoa solids, which is low, and a chocolate-coated or chocolate-chip biscuit is a different quantity again. The thresholds by dog weight are on our Diwali sweets page.
• Anything with raisins, kishmish or sultanas. Fruit and nut biscuits and dry-fruit cookies are the route. The published risk threshold is far lower than most owners expect and the mechanism is renal. The Diwali sweets page carries the dose, the disagreement between two good sources, and what to do.
• Sugar-free and diabetic biscuits. A sugar-free biscuit may be sweetened with xylitol, which the FDA records as a sugar alcohol used in baked goods such as cakes, muffins and pies, and which is dangerous to dogs. Read the sweetener declaration on the box, which Indian labelling rules require it to carry, and if a dog has eaten one the instruction is to call your vet, emergency clinic or animal poison control center right away. The mechanism, the two doses that matter and what the vet will do are set out in xylitol poisoning in dogs, which also explains why most Indian sugar-free products use a different sweetener entirely. Sugar-free biscuits are the one category here where the right response is a phone call rather than arithmetic.
• Any biscuit with a filling you cannot identify. Macadamia, coffee and alcohol-flavoured fillings all appear in imported and premium Indian ranges, and the packet is the only record of what is in them.

Everything else on the biscuit shelf is in the first category, which is to say it is not poison. That distinction is the point of this page and it is worth being precise about, because overstating it is both false and self-defeating. A reader told that a Marie biscuit is toxic will stop reading. A reader shown that six grams is a small dog's whole daily allowance will put the packet down.

If a dog has eaten something and you are unsure which category it falls into, the three-tier triage on our guide to Indian food for dogs sorts it, and the instruction for the first tier is to telephone a veterinary surgeon rather than wait.

What to give instead, at the same cost

An egg costs the same per gram of protein as a glucose biscuit and brings calcium, phosphorus and no added sugar with it. At Indian retail prices read on 21 October 2026, both work out at ₹1.49 for a gram of protein.

Here is the comparison that decides whether anybody changes anything. An 800 g pouch of glucose biscuits sold at ₹82 against a printed maximum retail price of Rs 100 carries 3,632 kcal and 55.2 g of protein, which is ₹2.26 per 100 kcal and ₹1.49 per gram of protein. A tray of 30 farm eggs sold at ₹254 against an MRP of Rs 350 works out at ₹8.46 an egg; taking the edible portion of a medium Indian table egg as 45 g, which is this page's stated assumption rather than a measurement, that is 64 kcal and 5.67 g of protein, or ₹13.15 per 100 kcal and ₹1.49 per gram of protein United States Department of Agriculture. Both prices were displayed by one online retailer on one day, with the egg tray packed at K R Puram, Bangalore, Karnataka, so read what follows as a ratio to check against your own shop rather than as the price you will pay.

Read the last two columns together, because the whole argument is in the contrast. As pure energy the biscuit is 5.8 times cheaper than the egg, which is exactly why the habit exists and why nobody should be sneered at for it. As protein the two cost the same, to the paisa. The egg is not the expensive option. It only looks expensive because energy is the thing we instinctively price.

For the dog at home

• Swap the biscuit for a piece of the dog's own measured food, taken out of the bowl before the meal. This costs nothing, counts automatically, and is the only swap that cannot go wrong.
• Keep one boiled egg in the fridge during the week and break it into four pieces. One piece is 16 kcal and 1.4 g of protein, which fits inside a 5 kg dog's entire daily allowance with room to spare.
• Use a spoon of plain unsweetened curd where the household habit is a biscuit with tea, and count it the same way.
• Give a piece of plain boiled vegetable, such as carrot or pumpkin, when what the dog actually wants is to be handed something.
• Hand a visiting relative the dog's own food to give it, rather than letting them reach for the tin. This is the single change that fixes most of the problem in most Indian homes.

Recipes are a separate subject and we are not starting one here. This page gives the swap in a sentence each and leaves the kitchen work to a dedicated guide.

For the street dogs at the gate

For street dogs the arithmetic flips in one important way and holds in another. A thin free-ranging dog is usually under its energy requirement rather than over it, so the calories in a biscuit are doing something they are not doing for a house dog. What does not change is the protein: 15.2 g per 1,000 kcal is a third of what an adult dog's food needs to carry, and a dog living on biscuits is being kept going rather than fed.

Two boiled eggs cost ₹16.92 and carry 11.3 g of protein. A 45 g packet of biscuits costs ₹4.45 and carries 3.1 g. If your budget for the dogs on your street is ₹20 a day, the eggs are the better buy by a wide margin, and if it is ₹5 a day the biscuit is what you have and feeding it beats feeding nothing. Say that plainly rather than making people feel guilty about the only thing they can afford.

Where, when and whether you may feed at all is a separate question with real law attached, and this page does not touch it. Rule 20 of the Animal Birth Control Rules 2023, the Supreme Court's orders on designated feeding spaces, the conflict with a resident welfare association and the hygiene rules at the bowl are all on our guide to feeding community dogs in India. What this page adds is only what is inside the packet.

What this page can prove, and what it cannot

Six claims on this page are measurements with denominators and five widely repeated claims about biscuits and dogs are not established, so the line between them is drawn below rather than left for you to guess.

Six claims here are established, and each names its source.

• A glucose biscuit declares 454 kcal, 6.9 g of protein, 25.0 g of added sugar, 13.0 g of fat and 296 mg of sodium per 100 g on its own FSSAI nutrition panel.
• An adult dog's diet requires a minimum of 18 percent protein as dry matter or 45 grams per 1,000 kcal ME under AAFCO, with the NRC figure given separately as about 20 g per 1,000 kcal.
• A healthy adult dog in ideal body condition needs 280 to 351 kcal a day at 5 kg and 1,080 to 1,346 at 30 kg, from the 2006 NRC maintenance equations.
• Dental caries was found in 5.25 percent of adult canine patients, and dog saliva has a mean pH of 7.5 against 6.5 in humans.
• Of 500 healthy adult dogs screened in Ludhiana, 36 percent were overweight or obese, 89.44 percent of the affected dogs were given treats and snacks regularly against 15.71 percent of normal-weight dogs, and 56.11 percent of their owners still called the dog's weight ideal.
• India's own dietary guidelines say sugar should be less than 5 percent of total energy per day for adults and list biscuits among the foods to restrict.

Five further claims are not established, and the list below marks where this page reasons rather than reports.

• No Indian pack publishes a consistent weight for one biscuit. Of the three read for this page, one declares 15 g, one declares approximately 3 biscuits and one declares approximately 10 g for approximately 1 biscuit, so every per-biscuit figure anywhere rests on an assumption.
• The edible portion of a medium Indian table egg is taken here as 45 g. That is this page's stated assumption, used to convert a price per egg into a price per gram of protein, and not a measurement we made.
• The sugar comparison applies a human guideline to a dog because no canine added-sugar recommendation exists. Dietary carbohydrate is not an essential nutrient for an adult dog, so there is no figure to compare against and we have said so rather than inventing one.
• No study has measured how many biscuits Indian dogs actually eat. The Ludhiana survey counted whether treats were given, not what they were or how much, and it sampled dogs presented at one veterinary hospital.
• The claim that a biscuit dough conditioner destroys thiamine in dogs is unverified for biscuits. The Australian government document logging the reported cases returned a timeout on this attempt, 21 October 2026, the readable case descriptions all concerned sulphite-preserved meat, and the additive named in the warning is not on the glucose biscuit's ingredient list at all.

One more figure deserves retiring. The pages ranking for this keyword agree that biscuits are high in salt and that this is a danger to dogs, and Google's AI Overview says excess salt can cause seizures. A 45 g packet carries about 0.33 g of salt, against the 20 to 30 g Merck gives as the threshold for clinical signs in a 10 kg dog. The salt in a biscuit is not what is hurting your dog. The 204 kilocalories are.

Finally, the boundary this site keeps. Bonbeno names no product as better or worse, ranks no brand and prescribes no diet. The composition figures above are read from published labels as a factual matter, and nothing here is a verdict on a company. If your dog is gaining or losing weight, drinking more than usual, showing dental pain or has ever been treated for pancreatitis, what goes in its bowl is a decision for the veterinary surgeon who has examined it, which is why this page publishes under the medical disclaimer at the top.