The Best Food and Nutrition for Your Dog
One question which dog owners ask their veterinarian more often than any other is “What should I feed my dog”? This is a good question to ask because it is essential for your pet to have a well-balanced diet in order to maintain a good state of health and wellness. Most pet owners are motivated by a strong desire to supply their pets with the best food and nutrition, so it’s only natural to ask this kind of question of an expert.
Understanding what to feed your dog will be easier when you know what the nutritional requirements are for dogs in general, and how those requirements have developed over the years. You might think that the nutritional requirements of dogs should center around various types of meat since they are carnivores, but that’s not strictly true. Dogs are similar to humans in that they are omnivores, which means their nutritional requirements can be met through a combination of meats and plant material.
The tooth structure of dogs, as well as their intestinal tract development, have allowed them to adapt easily to an omnivorous diet. This means under normal circumstances that dogs can meet all their nutritional needs by ingesting a combination of plant and animal foods. The actual source of the fats and proteins is not quite so important as the digestibility and the quality of these necessary components of a dog’s diet.
Your dog will thrive quite well if fed a well-balanced vegetarian diet, but on the other hand, an all-meat diet would probably end up being unbalanced and would fail to meet all the requirements of a dog’s diet. It is now known that a well-balanced diet has to include the appropriate number of vitamins, minerals, and essential amino acids derived from proteins, as well as some specific fatty acids.
All these components are necessary to build and maintain tissue, as well as to carry out a number of different biological functions. The required amount of each one of these components will change throughout a dog’s lifetime. Whenever you’re in doubt about the quantity of any particular dietary component, it’s a good idea to seek nutritional counseling from your veterinarian, or from your local dog store expert.
Best foods and nutrition for dogs
The six fundamental nutrients are minerals, vitamins, carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and water, all of which are necessary as part of a dog’s normal diet. All of these nutrients are significantly involved in the basic bodily functions performed by dogs. The minimum dietary requirement has been established for all these nutrients, and the maximum tolerable mounts are also known. Levels of toxicity are understood as well, although it’s not quite as well understood what happens over an extended period of time with deficiencies or excesses.
In order to have the best possible understanding of ideal foods and nutrition for your dog, particularly at its present stage of life, your best bet would be to engage in a session of nutritional counseling with your veterinarian. Your dog’s needs will change as it ages, and it will be necessary to update your knowledge, so you can continue to provide your dog with all the good food and nutrition it needs at that stage of its life.
As a general guideline, dogs are perfectly capable of digesting carbohydrates, although when complex carbohydrates are involved, like various types of grains, they’re more digestible for your pet after they have been cooked. You may also have heard that dogs should only eat raw foods and that they don’t digest cooked foods very well. This is not quite true, because over a period of millennia, dogs have adapted their diet to foods given them by their human companions, even if those foods have been thoroughly cooked.
In fact, when you have your dog on a fixed diet featuring raw foods, that can involve some health risks to the dog and the people in your house, especially those who are young or those who have compromised immune systems. The best approach to make sure that your dog receives proper nutrition at every stage of its life, is to provide a mix of meat and plant foods, in quantities that are recommended by your veterinarian for this particular stage of life.
