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3 Steps to Improving Your Pets Diet!
1. VARIETY!! Have you been told that your dog needs to eat the same food for their whole life to stay healthy? Unfortunately, this is a lie perpetuated by big pet food companies like Purina and Hills. They just want you to buy their food forever to make a profit!! In reality, the more variety you can incorporate into your pets diet the better. Try switching up your bag of kibble every time you buy a new bag! This will make a huge difference in your pets overall health. My rule of thumb is to switch up the protein source every time you buy a bag, and occasionally switch up the brand as well. However, if your dog has had the same food their entire life go slow. Make the transition to a new food as slowly as your dog needs to avoid any digestive upset. Eventually, when they’ve had enough variety they will be able to tolerate rotational feeding without any trouble at all. This is the same concept as in humans! If you’ve never had Indian food before and then one day eat a huge Indian feast of course your not going to feel great. Your gut simply isn’t used to it! But that certainly doesn’t mean it’s bad for you.
2. FRESHER FOODS!! A little can go a long way when you incorporate fresher foods into your dogs diet, including benefits like fewer allergies, more energy, and even help preventing certain types of cancers! Try sharing your fruits and veggies with your pup (stick with the lower sugar content fruits, like blueberries and blackberries)! You can also add things like bone broth (packed with glucosamine for joint support), raw goats milk (packed with probiotics) and beyond! This is also a great place to start thinking about incorporating some raw feeding into your pups diet. I’m vegetarian so I don’t know much about food safety with raw meats, which means I tend to stick with commercial raw diets to do the hard work for me, but if you do choose to share your meat with your pup remember to follow food safety protocols! The vast majority of commercial raw diets undergo a process called High-Pressure Processing, which kills off the bad bacterias without zapping out the raw nutrients. For me, this is a benefit to going commercial on this front, but again if you do choose to share meat from the butcher shop, make sure you’re following food safety protocols, and getting the highest quality meats you can to lessen the risk of salmonella and beyond. Keep in mind that our dogs guts are stronger than ours, so the risk of food-borne illness is already lower because of that. One easy way to start introducing some raw is to offer freeze-dried raw food as a training treat! Most of the freeze-dried options are about training treat size and they’re SUPER high value. When introducingfresher foods into your pets diet keep in mind the 90/10 Rule. This is a rule that most vets are comfortable with which means that 90% of your dogs calories should be coming from “complete and balanced” sources, and 10% can be non “complete and balanced.” You’ll know if a food (including lots of freeze dried raw like I mentioned) is complete and balanced by finding the AAFCO statement.
3. CHOOSING YOUR KIBBLE… Okay frankly this one is a huge topic to tackle, and I feel like this post is already super long winded. I’d be happy to do a deep-dive on this if people are interested, but for now lets just keep it down to a couple key tricks: 1. A specific meat should be the first ingredient in your kibble. Something like “chicken” “salmon” etc. 2. Avoid “meat meals” and other types of “meals” in the ingredient list. 3. Lower carb tends to be better, as our dogs actually have zero nutritional requirement for carbs. Carbs tend to be used mostly as “filler” by the pet food company to get cheap (but lacking in substance) calories.
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1 Reply
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This is a great post, @madeline-pape – thanks so much for these tips. I’m really excited because I started buying smaller bags of food and rotating proteins (as well as alternating grain free with grain-ful) just because it made sense to me… and now I’m adding in more topper fresh food; I feel really validated with your tips. What I do need to work on is paying closer attention to those labels – especially considering the very different nutritional needs of my dogs.
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