The array of foods available for you to choose for your friend is simply dazzling. There is a torrent of advice on what is best and how to provide optimal nutrition.
It is a sobering thought to think, in all this cacophony, that the pet food industry really has only existed for around or under one hundred years. That is a flash in the pan in evolutionary time. The pet food industry has evolved with dazzling speed. First came shelf stable canned foods, then dry kibbles when that metal for the cans was needed for the war effort, and now pouches, freeze dried raw foods, frozen raw or lightly cooked foods, prescription foods for so many different needs, all available with a visit to the grocery or pet store or the click of a button. How do we make sense of this?
One approach is to go back to basics and look at what our canine and our feline friends are designed to digest. Note that dogs and cats are not wolves and mountain lions. Most, unless exceptionally strong and healthy and exposed to raw foods from a young age, struggle to safely digest raw food. Even if the pet is not symptomatic, shedding of Salmonella and other nefarious bacteria is really common in pets fed raw food.
At the other end of the spectrum are kibble foods. The sourcing of these foods is often an unfathomable process by itself; somehow these ingredients need to be cooked, combined, and cooked again and then extruded at high temperatures to make that shelf stable nugget. So much processing really changes the ingredients and the energetics of the food itself. The leaping salmon and burly bison on the bag are surely not what is within. The longer the food is in the bag, the more rancid it can become; the risk of aflatoxins from mold lurking in the crumbs in the bottom of the bag is quite real.
It cannot be denied that nearly all of these foods are ultra processed with the same health implications for our pets as these ultraprocessed foods have for us. There are exceptions and we should be diligent to look for these; companies that pay close attention to sustainable healthy sourcing and the temperatures involved in alternate processing methods, This should be discussed on the label and website of the food you have chosen.
Sometimes a specifically designed prescription diet has such a powerful benefit for a medical issue that it is what is best, Some pets have such damaged GI tracts that all they can digest is a hydrolyzed food or an elemental food; literally amino acids, Can we catch these patients before this stage when that is all that is left for them to digest?
Fresh unprocessed lightly cooked foods should be considered for every pet. Even if this is not the only food fed it can be part of the diet, say half. There are prescription fresh unprocessed diets that meet most every need. Their bodies hunger for this nutrition, If necessary, recipes for these foods are readily available on many of their parent websites. Along with the recipe will be offered a mineral packet to balance out the diet for many nutrients especially calcium. Do this, It is critical to avoid jaw fractures and weak bones and teeth.
Many dogs really enjoy a 50:50 mix of a minimally processed safely sourced kibble with a fresh unprocessed lightly cooked food. Ideally please add some bone broth, designed for dogs, to the fresh unprocessed food and warm it up before serving. The temperature of the food is important for proper enzymatic activity for digestion.
There are fresh unprocessed foods for cats and surprisingly all of this applies to our feline friends as well, though cats can be much harder to convince based on their early experience with what constitutes food for them.
