Maximizing Your Dog s Health The Benefits of Choosing Top Breed Pet Food
Types of dog food and how to choose the right one
Just like with humans, there are specialty diets or dietary choices designed with considerations for a dogs age, health, or breed. Lets explore the six types:
1. Lifestage food
This term refers to a diet in which different food is given to your dog at each stage of their life. Sometimes these stages can be as simple as puppy, adult, and senior while other brands utilize more specific stages like weaning, juniors, nursing, etc. Many kibbles on the market are all stages foods meaning they can be fed to your dog no matter their age.
Theres currently debate on whether specific lifestage or all stages food is a better option, but there is no definitive answer one way or the other. If youre curious about this style of feeding, consult with your vet.
2. Prescription food
If your dog has been diagnosed with a health issue or is recovering from surgery, your vet may prescribe a special prescription dog food diet. These dog foods are only available with a prescription from your dogs veterinarian.
There is a wide variety of prescription dog foods for illnesses such as cancer, diabetes, kidney issues, and weight management, to name a few. These diets include extra nutritional support or exclude ingredients that can further exacerbate your dogs health issue.
3. Breed-specific food
These foods are formulated with the idea that certain breeds have specific dietary needs. While many breeds can thrive on general diets, breed-specific diets may be helpful in specific contexts.
Larger dogs are prone to joint pain while dogs like Dachshunds may be prone to back problems. Certain diets can promote bone density and ligament support.
On the other hand, you may have a dog with small teeth who finds it tough to chew larger chunks of food in which case small bites may be easier. If you have a large breed puppy, like a Great Dane, youll want to get them a kibble that supports their growth.
All in all, breed-specific food may not be the answer so much as what is specific to your dog and their needs.
4. Grain-free food
A few years back, grain-free dog foods were trending. Then the FDA got reports that dogs who ate grain-free diets were being diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathyTrusted SourceVCA HospitalsCommunity of veterinarians with up-to-date veterinary information.Go to source (DCM), a disease of the dogs heart muscle that results in an enlarged heart.
The FDA has since continued to investigate any connection between heart disease and grain-free foods. Veterinarians now recommend avoiding grain-free dog food unless your dog has a serious grain allergy (which is quite rare!).
5. High-protein food
Like with any food option, this one will be determined by your dogs specific needs. Protein is an essential building block in both the human and canine body, but sometimes certain dogs may need more than others.
Puppies, for example, need more protein than dogs that have already finished growing and those that hunt, play sport, or are highly active may also need more protein.
6. Sensitive stomach or limited ingredient food
Chronic stomach sensitivity in dogs is usually caused by allergies and intolerances and food made specifically for these situations can help ensure your dog gets the nutrients they need.
Many sensitive stomach foods contain probiotics and prebiotics that help promote healthy digestion. In that same vein, these foods may stray away from protein sources that have a history of causing tummy upset like beef or chicken, and opt for fish, venison, or lamb.
Limited ingredient food follows a similar path and has a shortened ingredient list that is free of common allergens like soy, beef, and chicken. If you suspect your dog has stomach issues or allergies, chat with your veterinarian about which option is best.
Unleashing the Benefits of Homemade Fresh Dog Food
This is a Paid Advertisement for ChefPaw by Innovet Pet Products
If youve ever tried making your own food for your dog at home, you might have found it to be a confusing and overwhelming experience. Figuring out how to balance ingredients to make sure your dog gets all of the nutrition they need can be difficult without the right tools and resources. Buying fresh dog food can be a good alternative for making fresh dog food at home, but pre-made fresh food can be cost-prohibitive. Every dog owner has factors to consider when deciding what to feed your dog. Factors like your dogs breed, weight, underlying health conditions, allergies, specialized nutrition needs, and your veterinarians advice are all things to think about when choosing what and how to feed your dog.
If youve decided that preparing fresh food for your dog is on the menu, the ChefPaw by Innovet Pet Products is the first dog food maker of its kind. The ChefPaw machine gives you the options for infinite fresh pet food right on your kitchen countertop, delivering preset recipes, nutrition analysis, and a recipe generator to pair with an all-in-one unit that weighs, mixes, and cooks your dogs food for you.
A Variety of Recipes for Your Dog
Dogs are individuals, and can have unique needs for food and nutrition. Creating custom homemade food for your dog is a way to not only give them what they need to support their nutritional needs, but also provide variety in their diet that you can control. With the ChefPaw app, you can choose toformulate your own recipes using the proteins or other ingredients that work for your dog, use the provided preset recipes, or set up a consultation with ChefPaws Veterinary Nutritionist Partners for two custom recipes formulated for your pet. Whichever way you go, you have a host of options to choose from to build a range of recipes that work for your dogs specific needs.
Suggested Recipes in the ChefPaw App
Every dog owner strives to feed their dogs nutritious and enjoyable meals. The ChefPaw App simplifies this process with expertly curated Suggested Recipes, made to cater to different needs and preferences of individual dogs. These are only a few of the recipes youll find on the ChefPaw App. Whether its a growing puppys nutritional needs, the high-energy requirements of an active dog, or the gentle dietary concerns of older dogs, ChefPaw has something for every dog. Try some of these popular recipes from the app:
Economy Recipe
This recipe ensures your dog is getting the nutrients they need at an affordable price. Made for as low as $1.81/lb, the Economy Recipe includes eggs, canned pumpkin, rice, carrots, broccoli, ground beef, water, ChefPaw Dietary Supplement, and Innovet Wild Alaskan Salmon Oil With Hemp.
Gordons Grub Recipe
This recipe is great for dogs with allergies or sensitive stomachs. Thoughtfully crafted, the Gordons Grub recipe from ChefPaw includes carrots, apples, broccoli, canned pumpkin, rice, ground turkey, honey, water, Innovet Wild Alaskan Salmon Oil With Hemp, and ChefPaw Dietary Supplement. By eliminating common allergens, it caters to the needs of dogs with special dietary requirements or dog breeds that are prone to allergies.
Novel Bison Protein and Rice Recipe
For those that a little more adventurous in the kitchen, try adding the Novel Bison Protein and Rice recipe to your dogs diet. This recipe is great for dogs with food allergies, and excludes beef, chicken, fish, egg, legume, potato, corn, and soy, which are all common allergy-inducing ingredients. This recipe is instead made with high-quality grass-fed bison, rice, broccoli, carrot, spinach, canned pumpkin, apple, honey, ChefPaw Dietary Supplement, Innovet Wild Alaskan Salmon Oil, and water.
Cooked Paleo with Beef, Fruits & Veggies Recipe
Recognizing the health risks posed by raw food due to strains of E. coli and Salmonella, this recipe is a cooked variant of the paleo diet, which typically includes eating fruits, vegetables, nuts, eggs, lean meats, and fish. Enriched with ingredients like bananas, blueberries, carrots, canned pumpkin, and supplemented with Innovet Wild Alaskan Salmon Oil and ChefPaw Dietary Supplement, this recipe mimics a diet that primitive dogs may have eaten, while still getting your dog all the nutrients they need to be healthy.
Personalized Meal Plans for Your Dog
You want your dog to have the best food you can provide them in order to help them live a healthy, balanced life. Making your dogs food at home is a way that you can control the ingredients that go into your dogs food, and choose exactly what sources and types of ingredients you want to feed your dog. With the nutritional analyzer and recipe generator in the ChefPaw app, you can start with the ingredients you know you want to feed your dog, and build balanced recipes from there.
If you have more than one dog in your home, you can have profiles for up to five dogs on your ChefPaw app. The app synchs with the ChefPaw machine so you can easily make personalized meal plans for each of your dogs. Each profile lets you store information about each of your dogslike their weight, breed, and activity levelso you can easily optimize their meals in ChefPaw.
Veterinary Recipe Consultations
Its always important to consult with your veterinarian when youre looking to change what you feed your dog. Your vet will have insights on your dogs specific health conditions, weight, and activities that can help inform how you feed your dog. In addition to consulting with your own veterinarian, the ChefPaw app also offers paid consultations with Veterinary Nutritionist Partners who will craft customized recipes for your dog using the ChefPaw machine. These Veterinary Nutritionist Partners will review your dogs medical history, dietary requirements, and formulate two recipes optimized for your dog, and these recipes will be developed to work flawlessly in the ChefPaw machine.
Save Time and Money on Dog Food
Fresh dog food subscriptions are becoming increasingly popular, and they can be a convenient way to be sure fresh dog food arrives for your pet like clockwork. If youre looking for more variety, control, and customization of your dogs fresh food, the ChefPaw machine puts infinite fresh pet food right on your kitchen countertop, no subscription required. Make enough fresh dog food for everyday meals, or prep ahead for vacation and freezeits up to you. You can decide how much or how little you want to make, and save room in your refrigerator or your freezer versus bulk deliveries of pre-made food on a schedule.
The ChefPaw machine can sit on your kitchen countertop, and only takes 40 minutes to make fresh dog food once you add your chosen ingredients from your preferred recipes. This multi-purpose machine eliminates the need for pulling out the kitchen scale, dirtying multiple pots and pans, and minimizes both prep and clean-up time.
According to Innovet Pet Products, the makers of ChefPaw, a household with two hungry Labrador Retrievers can easily spend $800-1,000 every month on storebought fresh pet food. (That assumes youre buying in bulk, which takes up a lot of fridge or freezer space you need for your family.) If that sounds like your household, then the investment in the Chefpaw pays for itself in just three to four weeks of use.
If youre already making fresh pet food for your dogs, then the time savings in prep and cleanup is already priceless. Making your dog food in the ChefPaw with ingredients that you control can also help you stay within your fresh dog food budget, and take advantage of special sales on proteins, veggies, or other ingredients that you use in your dogs favorite preset or custom recipes.
5 Best Large Breed Dog Foods (2024)
How to Choose the Best Dog Food for Large Breed Dogs
Large breed dogs add a lot of adventure and love to a home. To help keep a large dog healthy and well, a diet that is properly balanced and made from the highest quality ingredients is an absolute necessity.
Large breed dogs can be predisposed to several different health conditions that can be impacted by diet. Among the problems that can plague them include hip and elbow dysplasia, arthritis, and osteochondrosis. In addition to this, excess weight can greatly exacerbate the potential for disease. To prevent any nutritional impact on potential health problems in large breed dogs, it is recommended that all food be measured and all intake carefully monitored.
Bloat is another condition that can affect large breed dogs. This is of particular concern as bloat is often life-threatening. Although it is not known what causes bloat, experts agree that two of the most important things to avoid are eating too rapidly or too much. Feeding the best large breed dog food with pieces of kibble that encourage careful chewing and swallowing can help combat these tendencies.
Choosing the Correct Calorie Count for Large Breed Dogs
It can be challenging trying to determine how much food to feed a large breed dog. Many different factors come into play when making this assessment. The dogs age, activity level, and breed will all need to be considered in this decision. As a starting point, it is an excellent idea to use the suggested serving size on the bag as a guideline, making adjustments as needed with weight and appetite serving as helpful guides.
Dietary Requirements for Large Breed Dog Foods
Any food selected for a large breed dog of adult size should contain a minimum of 18 percent protein and 5 percent fat. Care should be taken not to choose a food that goes to extremes in either of these categories as excess weight can cause strain on the dogs body, possibly leading to injury.
Since large breed dogs can be prone to hip and elbow problems as well as arthritis, it is important to select a food that will provide support for the large dogs joints. Foods containing glucosamine and chondroitin are a great help in encouraging excellent joint health.
Large breed dogs require a diet that is formulated specifically to meet their needs. For this reason, the average generic adult food is not ideal. Foods designed specifically for large breed consumption are the optimal choice. The best foods for large breed dogs are dense in calories, meaning the dog needs to eat less food to achieve the same result.
To prevent overeating and assist with maintaining oral health, it is a good idea to select a large breed food that contains big pieces of kibble. In addition to these benefits, big kibble pieces encourage dogs to eat more slowly, thus helping to prevent bloat.
Protein should be the first ingredient in any food for a large breed dog. It should come from animal origins and is best in whole form whenever possible. Meat meals provide a powerhouse punch of concentrated nutrition; however, foods based on by-products and plant-based proteins should be avoided.
Dietary fiber is derived from the carbohydrates included in a food. Large breed dogs typically can eat grain-inclusive or grain-free foods with no adverse effects. The best choices for the large dog breeds diet include carbohydrates that are high in fiber and antioxidants to assist with digestion and fortify immunity.
Healthy fats are an important building block in keeping large breed dogs healthy. They provide vital energy and encourage coat and skin health. The best sources for healthy fats come from animal sources and include such items as chicken fat and oily fish such as mackerel, sardines, anchovies, and salmon.
Things to Look for in the Best Food for Large Breed Dogs
Here is a basic list of the most important things to look for in a food for a large breed dog:
- Whole proteins heading up the ingredients list
- Prepared without the addition of chemicals, flavorings, fillers, or mystery ingredients
- Enriched with probiotics and helpful supplements
- Meets AAFCO nutritional requirements for a complete and balanced food
