Saying No to Poor Quality Pet Food… Even When It’s Recommended by Your Vet

Posted by & filed under diet and health, pet food ingredients, prescription pet foods.

By Dr. Becker

Recently the American Animal Hospital Association (AAHA) added a fifth ‘vital health assessment’ for veterinarians in determining the health status of their cat and dog patients.

The four existing assessments are: temperature, cardio function, respiratory health, and pain.

The new “5th Vital Assessment”1 is nutrition.

Per Michael Cavanaugh, DVM, and executor director of the AAHA:

“Incorporating nutritional assessment into the routine examination protocol for every patient is important for maintaining optimal health, as well as their response to disease and injury.

The goal of the new guidelines is to provide a framework for the veterinary practice team to help make nutritional assessments and recommendations for their patients.”

Integrative and holistically-oriented vets have always done nutritional assessments on our patients.

In fact, I view species-appropriate nutrition as the first and most influential of the three pillars of health – the other two pillars being a sound, resilient body and a balanced, functional immune system.

And while I applaud the traditional veterinary community’s addition of a nutritional assessment in determining the well-being of dogs and cats, I’m a little concerned with where this initiative could be headed.

Here is how the AAHA introduced their new “5th Vital Assessment” initiative in October 20102:

DENVER — Nutrition is integral to optimal pet care. However, the American Animal Hospital Association (AAHA) found through its Compliance Study that only seven percent of pets that could benefit from a therapeutic food were actually on such a regimen.

The compliance discrepancy along with the many factors considered in assessing the nutritional needs of a healthy dog or cat, as well as the pet with one or more medical conditions, led to the development the AAHA Nutritional Assessment Guidelines.

The phrase ‘therapeutic food’ gives me pause, especially when I see that a major manufacturer of ‘therapeutic’ pet food has provided an educational grant to print the AAHA Nutritional Assessment Guidelines for Dogs and Cats3 in several languages.

Coming Soon to a Veterinarian Near You …

… a big push to switch your pet to a ‘therapeutic’ dog or cat food.

My discomfort with the therapeutic food angle grew when I came across a PetfoodIndustry.com article in January of this year.

According to the article, the same pet food manufacturer who provided an educational grant to the AAHA “… will make regular visits to more than 22,000 veterinary hospitals and clinics to help build support for and implement nutritional recommendations as the ‘5th Vital Assessment’ in pet healthcare.”

To accomplish this the pet food company plans, among other things, to add sales staff to call more frequently on vet offices across the country in order to sell more therapeutic pet foods.

Then I came across another PetfoodIndustry.com news item, also from January, announcing that a pet health insurance provider is adding coverage for therapeutic pet food.

According to the article, “… coverage now includes half the cost of therapeutic pet foods purchased through a veterinarian to assist in care of a pet for two months.”

‘Therapeutic’ Pet Food Ingredients Revealed

The following is a list of the first five ingredients in some of the therapeutic pet foods you may hear a sales pitch for the next time you take your pet to the vet for a wellness exam.

A can of cat food marketed as capable of improving feline bladder health:

  • Pork By-Products
  • Water
  • Pork Liver
  • Chicken
  • Rice

A bag of kibble advertised as good for feline gastrointestinal health:

  • Chicken By-Product Meal
  • Brewers Rice
  • Corn Gluten Meal
  • Whole Grain Corn
  • Pork Fat

A can of dog food to improve cardiac health in senior dogs:

  • Water
  • Corn Flour
  • Pork Liver
  • Rice Flour
  • Beef By-Products

Dry dog food marketed for canine renal health:

  • Brewers Rice
  • Pork Fat
  • Dried Egg Product
  • Flaxseed
  • Corn Gluten Meal

Regular readers here will immediately recognize the remarkably inferior, species inappropriate ingredients in these pet foods.

For the uninitiated:

  • By-products are what are left after all the good stuff is harvested for the human food industry. Beaks, feet, feathers, wattles and combs are chicken by-products. There could be something beneficial thrown in, like the heart or gizzard, but because there’s such potential for undesirable pieces and parts in ‘by-products,’ it’s better to avoid them altogether.
  • Corn in any form (including corn gluten meal, whole grain corn, corn flour, etc.) is an extremely allergenic food and difficult to digest. It’s also one of the three crops most highly contaminated with aflatoxins.
  • Brewers rice is a low quality ingredient that also happens to be a by-product. In addition, it’s a grain. Grains are not species-appropriate nutrition for carnivores.

Read here for the secret to cracking the code on your dog’s (or cat’s) pet food label.

Just Say No to ‘Therapeutic’ Pet Foods

Unfortunately, veterinary students don’t learn much about nutrition in their coursework. They graduate, go into practice, and become easy targets for pet food companies eager to fill their reception areas and storage closets with inferior quality ‘prescription’ diets for dogs and cats.

Now that the AAHA has added nutrition as the 5th vital assessment of a pet’s health, I think many pet owners will be hearing more about diets during vet visits. I also suspect many of these conversations will end with a recommendation to buy a ‘prescription’ (therapeutic) pet food to take home with you.

I absolutely do not recommend the extremely low quality, species-inappropriate pet food formulas being sold through vet practices as ‘therapeutic.’

I encourage my Natural Pet clients and all of you reading here to learn everything you can about the vital importance of biologically appropriate, high quality nutrition to the health and longevity of your pet.

I believe the more informed pet parents are about the type of food dogs and cats need to thrive, the less vulnerable they’ll be to a sales pitch for low quality pet food – even when it’s recommended by a veterinarian.

References:


Why Dry Food is Not the Best Food for Your Cat

Posted by & filed under cat health, diet and health, kidney/UT problems, pet food ingredients.

raw-and-kibble-cat-food

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s another great article by Holistic Veterinarian, Dr. Karen Becker:

By Dr. Becker

More evidence has emerged linking dry food diets and feline lower urinary tract disease (FLUTD).

A study was conducted at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Koret School of Veterinary Medicine to evaluate urethral obstruction (UO), which is an extremely common, life-threatening condition in cats.

The urethra is a small tube through which urine flows from your cat’s bladder to the outside of the body.

Urethral obstructions are usually mineral crystals or stones, or plugs of inflammatory material that form in the kidneys (a process known as urolithiasis), pass down into the bladder, and get stuck in the urethra, blocking the passage of urine from the body.

The urethra in male cats is longer and narrower than in females, so obstructions are more often seen in males.

Once a blockage develops in the urethra, the kidneys continue to produce urine and the urine starts building up in the bladder.

This is not only painful for the cat, it can also quickly interfere with kidney function.

The job of the kidneys is to flush waste from the body, and when they aren’t working properly, toxins accumulate in the bloodstream.

Feline urethral obstructions, if not treated promptly, can result in death in a matter of days.
(more…)

Fantastic Videos to Help You Pick the Best Foods for Your Pets

Posted by & filed under diet and health.

These are two videos I wish I had made myself, as we have these discussions with people on a daily basis. I also wish Dr. Becker was here in Portland – I’d give anything to be able to refer customers to her veterinary practice, and to have her out to the store for lectures, etc. The good news is that she has a great website/e-mail newsletter that addresses so many important health issues for pets. I highly encourage you to sign up for her free e-mail newsletter, and to peruse the archived articles on her website.

Here are two short videos filmed at our friends’ store, “Bad Dog Frida” – a great independent pet supply store in Madison, WI.
This one tells you about the best types of foods to feed your pets:

and this one outlines the types of foods you should avoid and how to recognize them:

Time to ditch the old couch for our pets’ sake?

Posted by & filed under diet and health, Green Tip.

otiscouch

By Green Dog Pet Supply

I just stumbled upon an interesting article about flame retardants in furniture having agreater cumulative effect in the bodies of our pets than in people. Apparently many of these chemicals were phased out in 2004 in the U.S., but of course many of us own furniture manufactured before that time. It’s very important to try to minimize chemical exposure for our pets and our children- those little bodies are even more susceptible to toxins than we are.  Here’s the link. http://news.discovery.com/animals/ditch-your-old-couch-for-your-dogs-sake-110427.html

Chicken Necks for Cats and Dogs

Posted by & filed under behavioral tip, cat health, chicken and poultry necks, dental health cats and dogs, diet and health, Joint health, raw foods, raw meaty bones.

Otis came to us at 10 years old with quite a bit of plaque on his teeth (pretty normal for a cat that only eats kibble) and during his dental cleaning, the vet noticed that he has a few abnormalities in the design of his mouth that  could cause trouble if not kept clean (pretty normal for a Himalayan). So, I’ve been working on acclimating him to having toothpaste rubbed on his gums with the hope of brushing them someday, etc. Another strategy we’ve employed is that we’ve started giving him chicken neck treats and have found it so interesting to watch him process them, as he chews and chews them on both sides of his mouth. Truthfully, I had recommended them to my customers, but before we had Otis, we have never had a cat that I could give them to – our last was in her 20s before we thought about giving her necks and she wouldn’t have done well with them at that point. I thought it would be interesting to people to see how they process them, so I took this video.  It also seems so stimulating for his mind – it takes him a while to figure out how he’s going to pick them up (I edited out a lot of that at the beginning of the video) and you can see him really thinking and giving it great effort, and he seems so satisfied all night on the nights we’ve been giving them. In fact, we’ve linked it to a game to make it all more exciting for him: There’s a great toy called “Da Bird”, whose feathers spin as they fly through the air, really simulating a bird in flight very realistically. When he makes an especially spectacular catch, he runs with it in his mouth to the kitchen and we give him his 1″ piece of neck, so it’s like he’s hunting, catching, and eating a bird. We adopted Otis because he had proven he could not remain safe outdoors (hit and badly injured by a car once and stolen at least once and luckily recovered). We wanted him to be safe and to protect the wildlife he was hunting during his 10 years as an indoor/outdoor cat, and we knew that turning him into an indoor cat meant that we would have to meet his physical and emotional needs to remain content indoors. As an indoor cat, this activity is very very exciting and satisfying for him, it’s supercharged the game making him exercise more strenuously, and no songbirds were harmed! We started with a piece of neck once a week, and have moved to about 3x a week. We believe that though he will continue to need regular dental cleanings, these yummy meat tooth scrubbers have helped his mouth stay cleaner. To create his treats, I buy half dozen whole chicken necks at a time, remove the skins, rinse them briefly and cut them into 1/2″ pieces with kitchen shears. I put the whole batch on a tray in the freezer so they freeze individually, and dump them into a freezer bag. On the nights we’re going to give one, we thaw it in a bowl of cool water – it takes very little time. Chicken gizzards also make a great cat chew/treat when cut into smaller pieces, though it takes less time for him to chew them than the necks

 

For dogs, you can choose from chicken necks for puppies or small dogs, duck necks (medium sized) or turkey necks for larger dogs. These can easily replace a meal for dogs. If your dog has never had one, perhaps hold it for them at first so they get the idea that it’s for chewing (I suppose I should say to be careful of your fingers, which are also made of meat and bone).  The benefits are great – so delicious and interesting to chew, and they really use their back teeth for crunching them up, making for a good toothbrush. We met a holistic vet recently who told us that he recommends feeding 3 raw poultry parts per week for dogs, in place of commercial joint supplements, due to the high levels of natural glucosamine and chondroitin and other joint supporting nutrients in the collagen and connective tissues of necks in a highly bio-available state.

Another nice benefit for dogs with anal gland issues – several chicken necks a week can make nice firm stools that help to express the anal glands more effectively.

That photo above links to a great video that shows how valuable poultry necks are for cleaning dogs’ teeth.

Feel weird about giving them? We did too a bit at first, but as long as poultry bones are raw, they can be fed to pets – never ever ever EVER cook poultry bones (or other kind of bone) and give them to pets – cooking makes the bones brittle and very dangerous. Raw poultry necks have smaller more pliable bones and lots of collagen. Our holistic vet thinks raw chicken necks are great! Think of all the hundreds of thousands of feral cats out there eating whole mice and birds – crunch crunch crunch! (Their presence is a real disaster for wildlife as a result – please see this link!)  However, for those that question whether cats can and do eat larger prey, and whether the tiny bones in a chicken neck could be unsafe for a cat to eat, here’s a video of a cat chewing the head off of a fairly large ground squirrel (of course this also illustrates what a risk cats are to wildlife. Not for the squeamish, but the point here is to show what their physical ability is to process meat and bone):
When feeding necks and other bones regularly to your pets, try to source organically fed/grass fed meats and bones to cut down on environmental contaminates. Try and buy them fresh from the best place you can (meat meant for humans to eat in supermarkets likely has a higher bacterial count than one sourced directly from a local farm (as supermarket meats are being sold and handled with the understanding that it’s meant to be cooked), or those from an Independent pet supply store, processed and handled carefully for the purpose of pets eating them raw. This is more of a concern for the safety of the humans handling them than for the pets, who aren’t as vulnerable to sickness from things like salmonella as we are.

The Completely Healthy Pet Food Your Vet Probably Vilifies

Posted by & filed under Cat nutrition, diet and health, Dog Nutrition.

By Dr. Karen Becker, DVM:
Today I’d like to discuss the reason why dogs and cats can, and should, eat raw meat.

This is one of the most frequent conversations I have with startled visitors to my home who say, ‘My gosh! You feed your pets raw meat?’ as well as clients at my Natural Pet animal clinic who already feed or would like to feed their pets raw, but are getting an argument from their own veterinarians about raw food diets for dogs and cats.

The whole debate about raw food doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Dogs and cats have consumed living, raw meats for thousands of years.

To this day barn cats catch and kill mice, and no one calls poison control. Farmers also don’t call poison control when their dog finds a litter of baby bunnies and pops them in their mouth like little Tootsie Rolls. In these cases, no one thinks to induce vomiting or say, ‘Oh my gosh! My pet just ate raw meat!’

The truth is both cats and dogs are designed specifically to consume raw meat. Their bodies are adapted to process raw, living foods.

Fast Food is Bad for Pets, Too

The first bags of commercial pet food entered the market about a hundred years ago. From a historical perspective, processed dog and cat food is a relatively new phenomenon.

However, your pet’s GI tract has not evolved in those hundred years to make good use of an entirely kibble-based diet — and it never will.

Fortunately, the bodies of dogs and cats are amazingly resilient and therefore capable of handling foods that aren’t biologically appropriate, like most dry pet foods. Unfortunately, this adaptability has led to a situation of ‘dietary abuse’ among the veterinary community.

Commercial pet foods — especially dry bagged foods — are so convenient. The majority of vets recommend them to all their patients. Processed dog and cat food is convenient, inexpensive, and there’s no preparation or cleanup required. You stash the bag in the pantry, scoop out a portion at meal time, drop it into your pet’s food dish and you’re done.

Because commercial pet food has been so successfully marketed (dog and cat food products are a multimillion dollar industry, after all), and because pets’ bodies are resilient and can survive, if not thrive on the stuff, we have been lulled into a sense of complacency about the food we feed our precious four-legged companions.

Most veterinary students don’t learn about species-appropriate pet diets in vet school. The only food discussed is processed, commercial pet formulas.

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The concept of feeding a living food diet is foreign to many vets. If a client mentions he feeds raw, the vet will ask, ‘Why don’t you just feed your cat regular cat food, for crying out loud? Why do you need to make food? Why do you need to feed living foods?’

It doesn’t take much research to uncover the fact that dogs and cats are designed by nature to eat living foods — unprocessed, raw, nourishing foods. Feeding a commercial formula is a bit like deciding your child can be healthy on an exclusive diet of meal replacement bars. No real food, just meal replacement bars.

A meal replacement bar is fine now and then, but no sane parent would ever consider raising a child on just those alone. Yet that’s what we’re doing when we feed our pets nothing but commercial, processed foods.

Living foods in your pet’s diet are necessary for successful overall immune and organ function.

Eliminating Parasites

It seems the biggest problem most people have with a raw meat diet revolves around parasites.

Parasites — roundworms, hookworms, tapeworms — are passed up the food chain and wind up in the guts of animals.

We don’t feed guts to our pets! If you buy a commercially available raw food diet, you will not find guts in the formula because guts contain parasites.

If you prepare a homemade raw diet for your dog or cat, you don’t include guts. Do not feed the stomach and small and large intestines. Those are the parts of the prey we get rid of, because those are the parts that harbor parasites.

Muscle meat — the part of the prey used to prepare raw food diets — is sterile except in rare instances when parasites escape the GI tract (guts) and travel there.

Certain parasites, like toxoplasmosis, that get into muscle meat can make your pet sick, which is why you should freeze raw meats for three days before feeding them to your dog or cat.

By freezing meats three days before serving (a lot like how sushi is handled), and by removing the guts of prey species, you can successfully avoid exposing your raw fed pet to parasites.

Salmonella and Your Pet

The second most frequently asked question I get about raw meat diets is, ‘What about salmonella?’

The most important thing to understand about salmonella or any other potentially pathogenic bacteria is that contamination absolutely does occur. It’s a fact of life.

Salmonella is the reason for most recalls of dry pet foods (and human foods as well). When a salmonella outbreak occurs, there has been contamination in the food chain.

The word Salmonella is used to describe over 1,800 serovars (species) of gram-negative bacteria. This bacteria lives in many species of mammals. The most common bacteria riding around in your dog or cat is Salmonella typhimurium.

I want to quote from an article titled Campylobacter and Salmonella-Associated Diarrhea in Dogs and Cats: When Do I Treat? It was written by Stanley L. Marks, BVSc, PhD, DACVIM (Internal Medicine, Oncology), DACVN, Davis, CA, for the Veterinary Information Network (VIN):

“The clinical significance of bacteria such as clostridium and salmonella causing diarrhea or illness in dogs and cats is clouded by the existence of many of these organisms as normal constituents of the indigenous intestinal flora. The primary enteropathogenic bacteria most commonly incriminating in canine and feline diarrhea is Clostridium perfringens, Clostridium difficile, Campylobacter, and Salmonella.

Veterinarians are faced with a quandary when attempting to diagnose small animals with suspected bacterial-associated diarrhea because the isolation rates of these pathogenic bacteria are similar in diarrheic and non-diarrheic animals, and because the incidence of bacterial-associated diarrhea is extremely variable.  Salmonella species are commonly isolated from both healthy and hospitalized dogs and cats.”

What this is saying, in a nutshell, is dogs and cats naturally have some Salmonella in their GI tracts much of the time — it’s not some unknown foreign invader but rather one their bodies are familiar with.

If you’re familiar with reptiles, the situations are similar. Reptiles are known to naturally harbor Salmonella in their GI tracts.

In an article written by Rhea V. Morgan DVM, DACVIM, DACVO for the VIN, the doctor asserts the following about illness resulting from salmonella:

“Factors that increase the likelihood of clinical disease from Salmonella include the age of the animal, poor nutrition, the presence of cancer or neoplasia, and other concurrent diseases and stress, as well as the administration of antibiotics, chemotherapy or glucocorticoids [which are steroids].”

The bottom line is potentially harmful bacteria reside in your pet’s GI tract whether you feed raw foods or the processed stuff. In other words, your pet is already ‘contaminated’ with Salmonella.

Dogs and cats are built to handle bacterial loads from food that would cause significant illness in you or me. Your pet’s body is well equipped to deal with heavy doses of familiar and strange bacteria because nature built him to catch, kill and immediately consume his prey.

Your dog’s or cat’s stomach is highly acidic, with a pH range of 1-2.5. Nothing much can survive that acidic environment — it exists to keep your pet safe from potentially contaminated raw meat and other consumables.

In addition to the acid, dogs and cats also naturally produce a tremendous amount of bile. Bile is both anti-parasitic and anti-pathogenic. So if something potentially harmful isn’t entirely neutralized by stomach acid, the bile is a secondary defense. And your pet’s powerful pancreatic enzymes also help break down and digest food.

Keeping Your Pet’s GI Tract in Good Shape

To help your pet’s digestive system remain strong and resilient enough to handle a heavy bacterial load and to support overall immune function, there are several things you can do.

  • Number one, minimize stress by feeding a species-appropriate diet, the kind your dog or cat is meant to eat. It’s important to feed vegetarian food to vegetarian animals, and meat-based food to your carnivorous dog or cat.
  • Minimize the drugs your pet takes, such as antibiotics. Reseed the gut during and after antibiotic therapy with a probiotic.  (Green Dog Note: For dogs, check out “Protect” probiotics which can actually be used during the time your dog is on antibiotics). It’s also a good idea to maintain your dog or cat on a daily probiotic to balance the ratio of good to bad bacteria (gut flora).
  • A good-quality digestive enzyme will help promote your dog’s or cat’s body to get the most out of the food you feed.

Providing your favorite pooch or feline with a balanced, biologically sound diet, a healthy lifestyle, digestive enzymes and probiotics, will nourish your pet, support healthy immunologic function, and bring overall vibrancy to her body.

This is in direct contrast to feeding a commercial formula of highly processed rendered byproducts, chemicals and grains — the typical mainstream pet food sold today. The sooner you transition your dog or cat to the kind of diet they were designed to eat, the sooner they will be on her way to vibrant good health.

From Truth about Pet Food:”EPA document proves euthanized dogs and cats are rendered”

Posted by & filed under diet and health, pet food ingredients, specific ingredients.

It’s a frustration that there is so little regulation as to what is allowed in pet foods, and so much regulation preventing better manufacturers from stating that the quality of their ingredients is sound. This means that companies using condemned meats are protected from having to reveal the content, source, or grade of their meats, even though the origins of these meats can be linked to very unethical sources and contain many chemical contaminants.

If you or someone you know is feeding a pet food that contains any of these ingredients: “Animal Fat”, “Meat and Bone Meal”, By-products”, or “Animal Digest”, it is likely that they are using 4D meats (animals that are not allowed to be used for human consumption as they are diseased, disabled, dying, or already dead. These meats are often “denatured”, meaning toxic chemicals are added to prevent them from being allowed back into the human food chain, treated with chemical preservatives to combat rancidity, and contain traces of the drugs used to euthanize the animals, like Pentobarbital (these chemicals do not “cook out”). Heres’ an article from The Truth About Pet Food website that further exposes some of the issues that some grocery store quality foods have.
http://truthaboutpetfood2.com/epa-document-proves-euthanized-dogs-and-cats-are-rendered

It’s Healthier to Feed on a Schedule

Posted by & filed under diet and health.

Photo By Anna Shephard, Photo Property of Green Dog Pet Supply

We at Green Dog strongly believe that both dogs and cats do better physically with scheduled feedings as opposed to leaving food in the bowl all day. I know that many of you groan when we say this, as cats especially can be difficult to convince that this is an OK way to be fed. However, if you stick to a schedule (perhaps twice a day at the same time every day for dogs, and ideally several times a day for cats, dividing their daily amounts into 2 or 3 ), pets will learn that it doesn’t work to complain at 2 pm if they always are fed at 8 am and 6pm (for example). Stick it out, and it will result in healthier, leaner pets. When there are multiple pets in the household, scheduled feedings with discreet portions that disappear after a short time helps to ensure that the fatter animals aren’t able to graze on the food the others leave behind. All of them will quickly learn that there is a window of opportunity available to them for each feeding, and if they don’t eat then, their opportunity vanishes until the next scheduled feeding.

It’s perfectly OK and even desirable for carnivores to fast a bit in between meals.  In the wild, carnivores work to find and/or catch their food, their body spends time digesting it, and then a period of time might pass before they are able to secure their next meal. They’re not built as grazers, and constant small amounts of food constantly diverts energy to the digestive process. Every time they eat, they stimulate insulin, keeping it at a constant higher level. This fools the body into thinking it’s always hungry.

Of course, if there is a geriatric animal in the home, or a pet who is underweight or suffering from a health issue, it may be advisable to separate them for additional feedings during the day. Just remember – like humans, weight loss can’t occur without portion control or additional exercise (or both). Higher protein diets can help your pet feel more satiated (full and satisfied) in between meals. Combine this with a bit of extra exercise and you’ll see your pets get slimmer and have more energy!

Some of Our Favorite Nutrition Resources

Posted by & filed under diet and health, Useful.

I wrote this up a while back for a nutrition lecture I was giving, and I thought it might be useful to post it somewhere for more people to use. These are some of our favorite resources for people to use when trying to educate themselves about their pets.
– Christine

Resources:

Watch the documentary “Pet Fooled” on Netflix! Tremendous opportunity for learning and spreading knowledge to others in your life who might not realize that what they’re feeding can hurt their beloved pets.

Excellent Link for Dog Nutrition (though cat folks can definitely glean some knowledge here too: http://www.dogaware.com/
The woman who compiles this site has encyclopedic knowledge about diet and nutrition for dogs and writes a lot of the food articles in The Whole Dog Journal.
Key links on her site that might be useful to you:
Lots of links to common health problems in dogs
http://www.dogaware.com/specific.html
including a ton of info on kidney disease and diet, specifically a lot about protein and its relationship to kidney disease: http://www.dogaware.com/kidney.html#protein

there are a lot of good articles that she wrote for Whole Dog Journal on home cooking: http://www.dogaware.com/diet/homemade.html

Sites online specifically for cats:
CatInfo.org – written by a vet, this is a comprehensive site that covers the basics of feline nutrition, with excellent discussions of common health issues such as diabetes, UTIs, and hyperthyroidism. She also has great info on Making Cat Food with good tips about transitioning a picky cat’s diet
Holisticat (includes an email list)
CatNutrition.org: feeding cats for health
How to Prepare Fresh Cat Food (technical but very complete)
The Feline Future Cat Food Company (Instincts TC) – a mix to which you add your own meat. I don’t carry it but it seems great. Good answers to peoples’ questions on this site about raw foods.
Feline Instincts – a mix to which you add your own meat. They also have a kidney diet
(more…)

3 New Studies show the Benefits of Fish Oils in Dog Diets

Posted by & filed under diet and health, joint pain, pet food ingredients, skin issues, specific ingredients.

Photo from Nordic Naturals Website

There are a few things that I wish I could convince more customers to try adding to their dog’s diet, and fish oil is certainly one of them. (the other one is digestive enzymes, and I’ll be writing about those soon).  They have many benefits, including reduction of joint pain and help with itchy skin, and now three studies have come out demonstrating this benefit in dogs with arthritis pain.

In humans it is well known that infants need DHA (one of the Omega 3 fatty acids) to aid in proper retinal and brain development, as well as support and maintenance of the central nervous system. In adults one of the best documented effects is the benefit to the heart (lowering of bad cholesterol and triglycerides, etc), but it is also showing good results in reducing inflammation (countless chronic diseases are linked to inflammation in the tissues and organs). It helps to reduce the chance of blood clots, to elevate mood, to slow down degenerative brain diseases like Alzheimer’s, as well as having significant effects on kidney function. Deficiencies have been linked to low birth weight and hyperactivity when pregnant mothers don’t get enough Omega 3s. (increasing your intake of low mercury fish oils through supplementation, and switching to grass-fed meats are two ways of getting more Omega 3s in your diet. Cutting down on your Omega 6s (vegetable oils found in processed foods) helps your body a great deal as well to reduce inflammation.

In Dogs and Cats these same benefits of course occur.  One of the effects that is most easy to observe is the almost immediate benefit to the skin and coat. Animals with chronic skin problems should almost always be taking fish oils. (more…)