What are the Best and Worst Foods for my Pet?

Today I want to talk about the best and worst foods for your pets, your dogs, and your cats. Whenever I do a video about food, it brings up a lot of emotions in people.

It’s one of the most emotional topics that I’ve ever covered, and people have real opinions about food. I want to talk today about some facts and some pinyin.

It’s going to be mixed in a little bit but let’s talk first about the fact that diet is so much the foundation of health in your pet, so that’s why it’s so important.

It’s a foundation if it’s not there and it’s not complete your dog is going to experience all kinds of health issues so also while you’re watching this video don’t feel guilty if you’re not feeding the best food the top the list.

The goal is to move up at least one or two notches so that you can do better and better for your dog. The other thing is, I realize that a lot of people can’t feed maybe the best food because of economic reasons but when you get to that point where you can do it economically, I recommend that you do that.

So let’s just start out with the best food you can feed your pet, and we talked about the best diet that means its species appropriate. I’m going to be obviously talking about canines and felines specifically, and one of the most important things for them is high protein.

They grew up their ancestors ate meat, they ate the stomach of their prey which meant there were also herbs and some enzymes.

When I’m talking about this diet, it’s not just a piece of meat. Make sure you understand that because some people think that this diet which I call either raw or a paleo diet is just giving your dog raw meat and it isn’t.

They do require all the minerals and vitamins that you need to either add to that or include in their diet in some way.

The other thing that they need is high moisture and roll or Paleo diet, and many of you have eaten a paleo diet for humans, so you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

It’s a species eating what it is supposed to naturally by nature eat and therefore the body will function better.

One of the reasons with dry especially commercial foods that we’re having a lot of organ failure in pets is because it doesn’t have enough moisture, so our pets are living in sort of a state of constant dehydration.

Drinking more water is not always what they do. They just are dehydrated most of the time, so if they were eating prey, for instance, you know a rabbit in the wild or a mouse or something like that would be about seventy percent moisture.

That’s why I wanted to make sure you understood how that is very species, also appropriate for dogs and cats. Low starches are low carbohydrates we’ve seen a lot in past decade of grain free being in vogue it doesn’t mean taking out all starches and all grains. It’s just that with commercial foods especially your kibbles you’re going to see a predominance of carbohydrates and that is not species appropriate for our dogs.

One of the things that happen when they’re eating a lot of carbohydrates, also is the carbohydrates stick to the teeth, and you’re going to have a lot of tartar build-up.

I find that if a dog has a lot of tartar or terrible breath putting them on a raw diet will take that away and throwing in some raw meaty bones uncooked.

Of course, because splintered bones would get lodged in the intestinal tract and may the end up in an emergency surgery but we’re talking about raw marrow bones that your dog can chew on and is going to clean their teeth naturally.

Choosing a Balanced Diet for Dogs

We need to talk about a balanced diet. We touched on that a little bit, and a balanced diet would be what I have learned as a student of a gentleman by the name of DR. Ian Billingshurst who was a veterinarian from Australia.

He did several years, I think it’s been 30 years at least since he started his research on a feeding species appropriate diet to cats and dogs and he found out what is truly complete and balanced. He recommended people start with a homemade raw diet which is the best diet.

If you can read a lot of the books such as a book called “Give your dog a bone,” which is the first book I read by Ian Billinghurst. There’s another one called “Growing out your puppy with bones,” and there are several other books that he’s condensed.

Those books into and the name of the company and the name of this concept of eating is barf and it sounds gross.

Some people go on to keep going to get my dog making it smells like barf, but it stands for biologically appropriate raw food. So as we are talking about this, that’s what I mean when I say barf.

When I talk about specifically as a product it is also called Barf World International, and there is a barf contingency here in the United States, and Ian is still doing his food over in Europe and Australia so most times we’re used to hearing an industry standard called ASCO which looks at dog labels.

You know what the minimum that you need to have in this food is it in. There’s also a newer cup agency that I have become acquainted with now call it a Fez and we’ll talk about that a little bit later when we speak of kibble.

They’re even more stringent because in selling some of the foods that go into Europe they have higher standards and so a fost comes in and does a lot higher standard type monitoring of the places where the foods are being made.

The number one best diet would be a homemade raw food, and if you’re going to do that I want you to not jump into it, I want you to at least get dr. Billinghurst books and read those. Find a good mentor, maybe a holistic veterinarian, they can help you there but realize it’s going to be for people that have a lot of time and maybe a lot of money.

A lot of people don’t fall into that category but some people do, and they want to make it themselves us. Also dr. Karen Becker has some books on homemade diet recipes that you can get your hands on one.

To make it a little easier if you get your food maybe from a butcher. We have a butcher close to us, and they have a kennel mix, and so you could take that mix which is organs and meat and some bones ground into a mixture.

And then what I mix into it because I know my dogs need their other nutrients in the form of fruits, vegetables. In a pulverized version you can’t just throw them in chopped up.

You want to either add them to a food processor or you want to have them pulverized like in the barf plus which is a canister about this big, and it has a little scoop and it.

I’ll tell you how much to use with your raw meat-bone mixture, and I recommend that along with barfs product called Alaskan salmon oil you want to add that to your dog’s diet. Those two things make the homemade easy if you don’t have a lot of time but you have the money.

The commercially made raw diets are becoming very very accessible although while they’re being made very available. A lot of dog food companies are jumping on the bandwagon and taking some other just crappy, horrible ingredients from their commercial foods and just making it into a soft form and calling it raw. Be very careful that when you look at those.

They’re going to pop up more and more in the next five years because raw as I’ve talked to holistic veterinarians are is going to be the trend and the norm within the next five years.

Many of them don’t want to let their clients make their own raw food, so they like the idea of a commercially made raw food, especially formulated by a holistic veterinarian who has done the research and knew what to do.

A lot of the concepts that barf has now come from Ian Billinghurst. There are other people involved in the company that are specialists in raw food as well, and so this is one that a lot of veterinarians feel very comfortable.

They feel like it’s dummy proof and they will recommend it to their clients so that would be one that I would recommend.

I’ve tried some of the raw food, and a lot of those contain a lot of high fructose corn syrup.

You want to watch for that, a lot of sugar in them, also watch just like we are with the commercial pet foods and the kibbles. The high amount of GMOs, lots of PPP fiber, pea flour, lots of corn phytoestrogens things are going to wreak havoc with your dog’s hormones and thyroidx.

Be very careful because these food companies are just jumping on the bandwagon putting stuff into the soft form and calling it raw. This is especially important with the increasing number of pet food allergies caused by inappropriate diet. 

The third food on the list would be a cooked, balanced homemade diet and although this is high on the list, I don’t recommend it.  Because again whenever you cook something, you break down the nutrients in that food, so that’s one of the things we do as Americans.

We cook everything so when people go into paleo diet they are eating all raw fruits and vegetables and maybe some lean meats, like fish and boiled chicken, so I don’t recommend that diet at all.

Number four would be a human grade canned food.

This is not nutritionally complete for cats and dogs, and it is the most expensive by the way.

Next on the list would be human grade dry food which is not moisture dent, so I wouldn’t recommend that because it’s not species appropriate.

Number six would be your super premium canned foods.

Number seven on the list your super premium dry foods.

Number eight on the list would be a vet recommended canned food.

I want to jump back to your premium dog foods because I always watch labels.

I find out that in the last five years a lot of that what used to be really good premium dry foods have, now become just full of fillers. Like I saw these GMOs phytoestrogens, and so I found that they’re doing this not telling the consumer and the consumer is all of a sudden finding these problems with their dogs they didn’t have before.

They change the label, did do not let this consumer know that, and so if anybody asks me if they just cannot do the raw diet and they you know insist on a kibble.

There’s only one and that I recommend it’s called life’s abundance throughout a Jupiter Florida. But that’s the only one that I would recommend, and a holistic veterinarian formulated it, and I spent a whole week with her beef where I even started using that food and recommending it.

I just want to a quick mention that a few years ago, our vet clinic staff went to dog food symposium in Florida, and when they came back, told us that the food that ended up on the bottom of the list, was the science diet, the prescription diet.

The scariest thing I found was at one point when my veterinarian handed me a jar of that, and they couldn’t even tell me what the ingredients were. That was scary to me, so if they’re not telling the veterinarians, they’re not telling the consumer.

Number 10 on the list would be your grocery store canned food. I’m just going to say, across the board stay away from the grocery stores. The other on the list would be a grocery store dry food and last on the list would be a grocery store semi-moist pouch food, and when you open that seal on those, it does have kind of a mushy texture.

Remember that one of the main ingredients in this product is propylene glycol which is the second cousin to antifreeze, so I would just say no no no. The worst thing you could do overall would be an unbalanced diet.

You don’t want to do a homemade diet, that is just food scraps so that would be the worst food. At the end of the day, you just throw whatever you guys ate, a piece of bread, maybe a few vegetables and some cooked meat and you don’t even give any thought to what is complete and balanced and species appropriate for your pet. That would be the worst food overall. Don’t beat yourself up, if you’re not at the top of the list. If you are, you can pat yourself on the back, just take the opportunity to try to improve what you’re doing.

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