How to Find Healthy Dog Food

There is only one type of healthy dog food. And that is the one which so closely resembles a wild dog's diet, as to be virtually the same as far as health benefits are concerned.

Lets look at some of the differences between a wild dog's diet and commercial dog food, a diet most dogs exist on (I won't say live, as it''s hardly a life).

A wild diet, a healthy dog food, consists of:

• raw food
• lots of raw bones
• internal organs are consumed, but these are scarce compared with the muscle meat
• carbohydrates which are limited to the stomach contents, so is small in the overall content

A typical commercial dog food consists of:

• cooked food (many vitamins, enzymes and other nutrients are destroyed by cooking)
• the meat is of poor (often extremely poor) quality (humans get the good stuff)
• carbohydrates, in particular sugar, are a major part of the food - it's cheap and bulks out the 'meat'
• the food is fortified with strong preservatives (not allowed in human food for their dangerous impact on health) - DESPITE WHAT THE LABEL SAYS
• to try to redress the nutritional imbalance, isolated and synthetic nutrients are added - nutrients which can't be properly absorbed and utilised when they are in isolation, or if they are synthetic.

So in your search for a healthy dog food, keep firmly in mind the diet of a wild dog. It's OK to take your time to get used to the idea. If you find the idea repulsive, just go slowly. Try to replace one thing at a time. Just keep in mind that dogs have evolved over millions of years, on this diet. Humans have only been producing (poor quality) commercial dog food for a few decades.

If you don't like the idea of raw meat for your dog, that's your issue, not his.

I also suggest that you keep in mind the concept that most people are lured by price. With the best will in the world, if a commercial pet food manufacturer suddenly started to produce quality pet food, because it would be more expensive, do you think it would be a sell-out?

That would only be possible if people had already started to reject the current commercial dog food and were now looking for a healthy dog food, so were prepared to pay a little more.

However, if you make your own dog food, you won't need to find the extra cash. Not only is a homemade, healthy dog food economical to produce, it has an enormous impact on the health of your dog, often beyond your wildest dreams.

Diet is critical to your dog's health. It is no less true for animals. The diet of pets is normally far worse than the diet of even the most slack human, as there are few, if any, safeguards and anything from low quality to outright poison abounds.