How to Give Your Dog a Quality Balanced Diet

With the recent massive recalls of many of our most trusted brands of dog food, lots of pet owners scrambled to find quality alternatives. Along the way, we began educating ourselves about pet nutrition. Good nutrition is about supporting your dog’s health from the “inside out.” With the right nutrition, you even may be able increase your dog’s life span up to two years. Read on to learn how to give your dog a quality balanced diet.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• A high quality brand of dog food (wet or dry)
• Raw meat such as ground turkey, emu or chicken (preferably organic, natural / free range)
• Cut up veggies
• Quality dried sea fish product
• Filtered or bottled water

1. Look for dog food that’s free of artificial ingredients, preservatives, drugs, hormones and pesticides. Read the labels. The large commercial dog food companies fall by the wayside here. The words natural and “whole food” are important ones. “Whole” foods contain everything our bodies need to digest them. Look for brands with low carbohydrates, no fillers and few chemicals. Too much of those make dogs’ systems work too hard and put stress on their immune systems, creating a host of health problems including allergies. The saying “keep it simple” applies.

2. Buy dog food that contain antioxidants, enzymes, flaxseed or Omega 3. These help keep your dog’s body balanced and boost their immune system. With these ingredients, your dog’s coat will be healthier too.

3. Find a good probiotic product. Probiotics contain live microorganisms that help restore the balance of microflora in the digestive tract. You can find quality pet-geared ones online, usually in powder form. This product can even help reduce excessive pet shedding.

4. Consider giving your dog a dried deep-sea fish powder you can find online. Many dogs (and cats) love this product. It’s a “whole food” product that can help defeat allergies and other immune system stressors and promotes your dog’s health.

5. Don’t feed your dog table scraps. Research shows this not only promotes pets becoming overweight, it’s improper nutrition and can cause serious health problems.

6. Add raw food to your dog’s diet, once a day. Cut back on the amount of dog food when you add the meat or you’ll overfeed your dog.

7. Add cut up veggies to one meal a day. You can steam a large amount ahead of time and freeze some while using the rest. Again, cut back on the amount of dog food in equal proportion to the veggies you add. Rotate the types of veggies. Dogs love carrots, green beans (cut the ends off), chopped broccoli and small bits of squash. Your dog will come racing to eat.

8. Always go for quality. These days, with manufacturers cutting corners, remember the saying “you get what you pay for.” Doesn’t your dog deserve the good stuff?

Tips & Warnings

• Always read labels. If you can’t pronounce an ingredient’s name, you may not want to buy the product.
• For dogs with allergies, there are dog foods to fit their needs. Go online or ask a knowledgeable pet store owner for help with this.
• Check with your vet if your dog has a reaction to a new dog food. Better safe than sorry is a good adage to follow.

Resources

• Pet Nutrition Information

[Homebody7]

on 1/29/2009 This is a super article! Thanks for writing it. I only have one piece of advice: When mentioning raw food, you should remind people that raw hamburger or chicken should not be used without cooking it first. Dogs are subject to the same organisms we are and everyone knows how raw hamburger meat can contain e-coli and chicken can contain salmonella. So if you are not buying "treated" raw food for your dog, you should cook it gently to kill bacteria etc. I'm speaking from experience here: I read about how good raw food is for dogs and gave my dog raw hamburger meat. He got diarrhea and he was an older dog. He got over it but the vet told me that if the dog didn't kill the cow or turkey, then you should cooke the meat.