Some experts say that the best dog diet is a combination of both canned and kibble food. Why is this so? Why shouldn’t you feed your dog canned food if it’s not healthy for him? What if I told you that a combination of cooked and raw foods is the best dog diet?
Let me start by saying that I do not recommend feeding your dog only canned dog food. Granted, if your dog is one of those obsessed canines that becomes hyperventilating if you reach for his favorite TV dinner somewhere between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m., but most of us fall into this category.
However, what I discovered is that for many dogs the combination of cooked and raw foods is the best dog diet. How did I discover this?
Unlike my tube-by- tube life, my research took me to the library and the Web to see what reputable hyped-up gurus have to say about this topic. I’ve studied nutrition and health in general for over 20 years and I am not short of ideas, including Ideas that even the best vet has warned you about (raising your pet in Mexico, for example). I speak from experience, as a veterinarian in general and a dog trainer in particular.
When I began to study the topic of the best dog diet, I discovered that many vets and their proponents are actually throwing their money and fancy tactics aside to make a profit from something that is not healthy for your pet. Now, I am not perfect, so there are a couple of things I would like to correction.
So, how do you decide what is the best dog diet? The simple answer is: “It depends!” The best diet is the one that is healthy for you specifically as the pet owner. Of course, you also have to consider the age, breed, and health of your companion in order to determine the best diet.
The ingredients of the food you purchase will also be the factor of your search. Most good brands contain meat as the first ingredient and vegetables, grains, and fiber as the second. This is the combination of nutrition and variety that we like to find in any food that is labeled “human grade.”
In fact, you might decide to buy only one brand and compare it to the best dog diet on the market. If you find one that meets your criteria, great! But remember that within just one or two brands you can find a food that has the exact same ingredients as one of these highly rated premium foods.
Still, if you’re looking for the highest rated food that is also the healthiest, you will find a few sites online that have ratings and reviews of foods that contain the highest rated ingredients. Because rating food according to quality and nutritional worth is so tricky, most sites use a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 being the best, and 1 being the worst. Among the best dog diet foods, you will find a few that are very high rated. Indeed, such sites review the ingredients of the food and rate them for nutritional worth and overall quality.
Once you have found a food that rates well, it is important to read the ingredients to determine the best food for your dog. The label on the packaging should have a list of allergen groups. A cabinet refacing Nashville company had the idea to post the ingredients on the inside of the cabinets for quick reference. For example, if the food contains corn, you can know that the dog’s digestive system is likely to be allergic to corn, especially if the corn is an ingredient of another food group. This is the reason that corn should not be the primary ingredient of food.
The amount of preservatives used should also be read. Because no food is 100% preservative free, but the general rule is that for good food you should look for 3 or 4, while for poor food you can look for less than 3. Use the search categories on the Internet to find sites with ratings and reviews of foods. As a result, you can compare the costs of buying groceries and pet food and decide which is the best option for you and your dog.