Dog food: what’s best for your dog?

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Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed

He’s your dog, and he deserves the best dog food. Nutrition for your dog is just as important to that of any other family member.

There are a number of different kinds of dog food to choose from, and making the choice as to what the best is can be difficult. Let’s look at the options you have in dog food and what makes them good or bad.

Homemade dog food

Is homemade best? Homemade dog food is popular with people that take the attitude that they want to know exactly what goes into their dog’s food, and with those that argue that dogs have lived fine off man’s scraps for centuries. Homemade dog food can be made from raw meats, which are popular with some, or can be cooked and mixed with things like brown rice, vegetables, and such.

While it does ensure that you don’t get as many additives in your dog food, maintaining a balanced and nutrition-rich diet can be just as difficult in dogs as it is in people.

In fact, a pure-meat diet can be very bad for your dog. Meat contains too much protein, and no essential vitamins, or minerals.

Wet Food in cans or pouches

Wet dog food comes in can or pouches nowadays, and consists of food that’s been kept moist in some way, giving the dog a juicy meal to eat. The benefit of this sort of dog food is that it’s easy to provide nutrition that’s been formulated just right for your dog. However, there is the danger of having additives in the food that you wouldn’t want there. Also, wet food can be messy, particularly when it comes time to clean the dog bowl or to store what you didn’t use until the next feeding.

Dry Food - biscuits and kibble

Dry food is popular with some, since it’s not as messy, and all you need to do is pour the food out of a bag, with less cleanup and less mess. This kind of food is also made formulated specifically for dog health, making it good from a nutritional standpoint. However, because dry dog food is often stored in big bags, the food can go stale easily if improperly stored.

Also, because the nutrients and greases in dry dog food are often sprayed on the surface of the food, heat in storage or shipping can destroy the vitamin coating or cause the grease to go rancid, which is bad from a health standpoint as well as one of taste.

But, whether you go for making your own or using wet or dry commercial dog food, your main concern should be for your dog’s health.