Food

It's important that the home-prepared dog food diet you feed your dog is complete and balanced

It is not easy to figure out how much fat and other nutrients are really in the food you feed, whether it's kibble, canned food, or a home-prepared raw or cooked diet. Here are some tips that can help. There are three different ways of measuring amounts of protein, fat, carbohydrates, and fiber in foods.

In recent years, the pet food industry has discovered the benefit of sharing more information about its products, manufacturing and research and development with consumers. In a highly competitive market, it's advantageous to project a confident image of full transparency - as long as the company is doing everything they say they are doing. In the wake of a substantial amount of bad PR from a nearly decade-old PETA campaign showing conditions of research animals, Whole Dog Journal had the opportunity to conduct extensive tours of two large pet food manufacturers' research facilities.

On March 30, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that it had rejected a petition from environmentalists that would have banned bisphenol A (BPA) from all food and drink packaging. The scientific evidence at this time, said the FDA, does not suggest that the “very low levels of human exposure to BPA” afforded through our diets are unsafe. “The agency has performed extensive research on BPA, has reviewed hundreds of other studies, and is continuing to address questions and potential concerns raised by certain studies,” the news release continued. “The agency takes all concerns about BPA seriously and is evaluating them as part of the agency’s ongoing oversight of food safety.”

Making meals from scratch is the only way I know to have exactly what I want for my dogs – no ingredients from places with spotty records for quality assurance, no multi-syllabic additives making a label longer than I like. After I covered the pet-food recall in 2007, I changed the way I eat and the way I feed my pets. For my dogs, that meant commercial products from companies I trusted, along with raw-food meals from regional sources of meat, grains, and vegetables. It wasn't a huge shift from raw to cooked when my Flat-Coated Retriever, McKenzie, started chemotherapy for soft-tissue sarcoma a few days after her seventh birthday. At the suggestion of her veterinary oncologist, I dropped the carbs, rebalanced the diet with the help of some expert advice, and started feeding McKenzie Meatloaf" to all three of my dogs."

Bill and Marin Corby of Romeo, Michigan, feed a homemade dog food diet to their two rescued Cockapoos. Max, estimated to be anywhere from 6 to 9 years old, has been with them for three and a half years. Max weighed 32 pounds when first adopted, but his current weight is a healthy 20 pounds. Mickey was four months old and very sick when they first brought him home, as he had problems digesting his food. The Corbys switched Mickey to a raw dog food diet, and he’s now thriving at 20 months of age and 16½ pounds.

Many raw dog food diet proponents claim that the nutrients and/or chemical composition of a raw diet keeps dogs from developing gingivitis or periodontitis. We’re not aware of any studies that have proven these claims, but the persistence of the anecdotal evidence of this phenomenon (to say nothing of its evolutionary success) suggest that there are dental benefits to a diet that includes raw, meaty bones.

Ingredients are listed by weight, so you want to see a lot of top quality animal protein at the top of the list; the first ingredient should be a named" animal protein source. "Meat" is an example of a low-quality protein source of dubious origin. Animal protein "meals" should also be from named species (look for "beef meal" but avoid "meat meal")."

I've always wondered how wet dog food gets made – but it took a long time to find out. It seems like it's more difficult for a journalist to get into a pet food cannery than into a factory that builds spy planes. So when Whole Dog Journal is asked to take a tour of a dog food manufacturing plant we jump at the opportunity. This article details how canned dog food is made at one plant. From the initial ingredient preparations, to the canning and cooking process and the QC and testing procedures along the way, this article captures it all. Included in this web-only feature are detailed photos taken by Whole Dog Journal during the plant tour. Be sure to click on each image to enlarge it.

Whole Dog Journal readers have learned how to identify the best commercial foods when they shop for their dogs. But whether you feed dry kibble or canned food, even the best commercial diets can be improved with the addition of appropriate fresh foods. Keep the following things in mind when adding fresh foods to your dog's diet.

A valid food elimination trial for the purpose of confirming food hypersensitivity consists of three phases: elimination, challenge, and provocation. In the first (elimination) phase, the dog is fed a diet consisting of a single protein source and a single carbohydrate source. Both of these ingredients should be completely “novel” to the dog – foods he’s never eaten before. (Thirty years ago, lamb and rice was the go-to food elimination diet, because those ingredients were not yet widely available in commercial pet foods. Because the diet was novel, few dogs had developed allergies to those ingredients, and “lamb and rice” gained an unearned reputation as a “hypoallergenic” diet.

Over the past few months, I've read more than 30 books on homemade diets for dogs. Many offered recipes that were dangerously incomplete; a smaller number provided acceptable guidelines but were confusing, unduly restrictive, overly complicated, or had other issues that made me recommend them only with reservations. A few were good enough to recommend without reservation. This review is about the cream of the crop: three relatively new books (one is a new edition of an older book) whose authors have taken the time to analyze their recipes to ensure that they meet the latest nutritional guidelines established by the National Research Council (NRC).