• We Are Hiring
  • WAGpedia
  • Articles
    • Whatsapp
      • DogSpot makes shopping easier via instant messaging!

How you can make sure that you are feeding your dog a healthy diet..

10 Jan 2009 | by Anil @ DoggiesDude | Posted in: Wellness

For anybody who understands just a minimum of biology, it is obvious that different species thrive on different food. Each species has its own preferences for what is "right". It is genetically programmed, and there is a very fine balance between preference and value: all naturally living creatures want to eat what is good for them. If not, the species would not survive very long! Only when there is a good match between what the individual animal wants to eat, what its gastrointestinal system actually can digest, and what its body needs, will it have a chance of survival.

You dog is a domesticated wolf, not a four-legged monkey!

First step in your due diligence should be to get at least a working understanding of how a dog's stomach works. Just for the record: it is very different from the way a human stomach works! What is good for you is not necessarily good for your dog - and vice versa.

Did you know that a wolf can eat about 20-25% of its own body weight in one single meal?

Dog generally stop at 7-8% - and they reduce that down to around half when given the opportunity to full the stomach on a fairly regular basis.

However, dogs need only about 2% of the weight in average daily food intake. Wolves require about three times as much because of their intensive travel.

How we betray Nature - and ourselves...

Unfortunately, man has made some horrible screw-ups of Nature's balances. Through chemical technology, it is now possible to isolate and up-concentrate the ingredients we crave the most, leaving the rest of the natural food in the garbage.

The classical example is sugar. Naturally, sugar exists primarily in ripe fruit. Ripe fruit happens to also contain some of the largest naturally found concentrations of Vitamin C - a life necessity for humans. The taste of Vitamin C (Ascorbic Acid) in its pure form is not very pleasant, but in small concentrations and mixed with comparatively large concentrations of sugar (which is chemically very closely related to Ascorbic Acid, by the way...), we get a nice fresh, sweet taste most humans are very attracted to.

For the cave man, this was a great survival tool. It made him crave the fresh, ripe fruit he needed so badly for his supply of Vitamin C - and in Nature, these two always go hand in hand: all sweet fruit contains healthy concentrations of Vitamin C. The sugar craving thus ensures a sufficient supply of Vitamin C...

However, for modern people in a society that masters chemistry, this became a curse: Chemists were able to extract the sugar and refine it and generate products from it that were sooooo sweet that they could beat the natural fruit in regards to the attraction they provided for sugar-craving humans...

We all know the devastating effects sugar has on our health when taken in excess amounts, especially when concentrated, like in candy. By adding an artificial food source we have no natural access to, we now have to manage our cravings - because they no longer guide us to making healthy choices in regards to the food we pick to eat...

For the cave man, this was no problem - his only way of satisfying his quest for sweetness was by picking ripe fruits....

The commercial reality

All commercial dog food manufacturers produce dog food in order to make a profit. They know that you want to see your dog happy for its meal. This makes it impossible for them to make the food out of ingredients that are not necessarily good for the dog, unless they add some other ingredients that are so attractive to the dog that it will make unhealthy choices - just as children prefer candy over fresh fruit...

The really bad news for you is that there are no legal guidelines in America for what a pet food manufacturer is allowed to add to pet food, and there is so much evidence of synthetic chemicals being added that it is far beyond a shade of doubt that you cannot rely on commercial "dog food" being biologically adequate at all for your dog! As a matter of fact, there is so much evidence to the very contrary that you will never want to feed your dog any form of kibble or canned food once you get a chemist to explain to you what is actually in the food you can buy for your dog....

One example is grain. Grain is the cheapest energy source we can get. Kibble products generally contain some 70% carbohydrates from grain. Now, for a human, this would be great - but a dog is not genetically programmed to digest grain in large quantities.

Another example is fat. People in our modern society are programmed to see fat as "bad". Well, the truth is that humans cannot deal very well with too much fat - when is has been heated.... But dogs need fat for their metabolism to a degree that is comparable to a human's need for carbohydrates! Raw fat, that is.

Then we have the whole issue about cooking. All dry or canned dog food has been cooked. Otherwise, it could not keep. But heating raw meat will destroy many nutrients a dog need as much as people need vitamins

On more example is Vitamin C. As explained already, this vitamin is truly vital for humans. But dogs produce it themselves! They have some specific metabolic processes in their bodies that convert Glucose into Ascorbic Acid (which is Vitamin C) together with a number of other chemicals their bodies need! But if we add Vitamin C to their food, we totally screw up those processes and cause liver and kidney damage!

And Calcium. You learned that Calcium is important for developing healthy bone structures. Well, there is much more to that, but what few people know is that, for a dog, it is vital that Calcium and Phosphorous remain carefully balanced with each other! You can thus very easily give your dog too much Calcium, and the result is a destruction of its bone structure, like osteoporosis!

And what about those labels on the pre-manufactured food claiming that this food is "completely balanced"? Balanced for what? Not the dog's nutritional needs! If that were the case, there would be no way of making those kibble products contain more than 60% grain when it is well known that dogs do not need grain at all in their diet! If "balanced" were to be taken at par value, it would also mean that the food would naturally contain about 70% water - but no kibble product contains any more than 10% - if not much less....

You have a sad example of commercial misuse of information to make you think their products are good in the way pet food manufacturers label their products.... When you read those labels with all those chemical analyses on, you might get impressed. But the truth is that you most often have very little reason to be impressed, as the information often is misleading - or irrelevant, at best.

The "raw food danger"

Maybe you heard that raw food is dangerous because it contains bacteria or nasty parasites? Well, for a carnivore, that is just "extra protein"... Except in some extremely rare cases, those parasites simply get killed in the stomach.

Dogs do not get sick from eating food that is perished n a natural way. Their immune system handles that just excellently. Besides, the whole scaremonger about the danger of bacteria in food, like salmonella and E. Coli is just that: scaremonger

Or you heard that raw meat makes dogs blood-thirsty and aggressive?

Well, the problem with giving a kibble-fed dog some raw meat is that it most likely will value this precious food so much that it might show some protective behaviors around it until it gets accustomed to being fed real food and will start to relax. That might take a few weeks. If you had only a bicycle for transportation, wouldn't you be protective of your new car? This stupid blaming aggressive/protective behavior on the raw food is actually outright false: it is the constant feeding of kibble that creates the aggressive behavior!

Feeding a raw natural diet is not complicated. But it does take that you understand the principles behind the dog's digestive system - which is totally different from the human system! And it takes that you understand the basics of nutrition - and how you put a healthy meal plan together for your dog. Once you have this basic knowledge acquired, the rest is easy. The news is even this good: you do not have to think about balancing every single meal - you can actually do better by not making all meals the same! As long as you get everything included over a few weeks, your dog will be very much OK - and it takes away the burden from you to "micro-manage" the meals.

The difference between propaganda and facts...

It is almost an insult to tell you that commercial information, by nature, cannot be trusted as "facts". all marketing, promotion, and advertising has only one purpose: to make sales. Commercial information does not aim at giving you any more knowledge than what the business behind it believes is what you need in order to be persuaded to buy their product. It is a biased as anything can be. Even when a veterinarian, or a scientist put his/her name behind it! Those people are paid for doing this! The pet food manufacturing companies generate over 50 billion dollars in yearly revenue. Don't you think that they could afford to pay a few scientists to make some nice statements in public? Don't you think they can afford to hire a very skilled staff to take care of this for them?

And worse yet: the whole concept behind pet food manufacturing is based on a "recipe" that dogs are OK with 2/3 of their diet consisting of grains and grain products - which are 90-95% carbohydrates! mind you, the wolf's natural diet contain no carbohydrates at all....

And the remaining 1/3 is typically made up of all kinds of waste products, all them cooked to death. Wolves never cook their food....

The best example you can get of the whole falseness of the pet food industry is from the melanin scandal in March-April 2007. Melanin is a natural poison that is generated by some micro-organisms that naturally live in wheat gluten. So, when feeding wheat gluten we can expect this to happen from time to time, right?

But we can actually expect a similar thing from any un-natural food ingredient!

The reason is that dogs have never had a chance, through evolution, to develop any defense mechanisms against possible poisons in wheat gluten - because they never ate that stuff!

Same thing can be said about any other un-natural ingredient in "pet food".

The only protection you have against this kind of "commercial oops" is feeding only natural foods!

The reason is obvious: dogs are adjusted, through millions of eats of evolution, to handle the problems in those foods very well! And those, who did not, are not the forefathers of our modern dogs...


Very useful!

All dog owners must know this.

By: bhartan | 26 Feb 2010

Gr8 article
Will be very helpful if you kindly write something about raw diet, its ingredients & proportions...what to give & how much..

By: Runni | 26 Feb 2010

Anil @ DoggiesDude
http://doguedebordeaux.in/rawd iet.pdf

PMR is 80/10/10 (%) of Meat/Bone/Organ

By: Anil @ DoggiesDude | 26 Feb 2010

Really nice & informatic book...thanx a lot for the link

By: Runni | 27 Feb 2010

Avijit Dutta
Good information to share with like minded friends.

By: Avijit Dutta | 27 Feb 2010

Himanshu Mehta
What if we can't feed raw?

By: Himanshu Mehta | 16 May 2010

Write a Story
