The Best Food for Your Pet

A common task of a Board Certified Veterinary Nutritionist® is to design custom homemade diet recipes for pets that have health issues or for pet owners who prefer not to use commercial foods. We’ve covered some general mistakes that pet owners often make with homecooked diets when they don’t work with a veterinary nutritionist, as well as some situations where cooking for your pet may not be optimal. In this post, I’d like to focus on misconceptions and mistakes about homecooked diets that my colleagues and I frequently run into with our clients – pet owners who get their recipes from a veterinary nutritionist. These issues tend to come up after the consultation, when our clients receive the completed recipe and start cooking. These misconceptions often cause frustration for nutritionist and pet owner alike. Equating volume of food with calories – after a homemade recipe is created for a pet, it is common to have the pet owner question the volume amount of the food because it looks like less or more than they expected it to be, often based on the pet’s previous diet. There may be the perception that there isn’t enough food, but more frequently, the concern is about too much food. Homemade diets are formulated to provide the amount of calories that the nutritionist feels is appropriate for the pet, either based on the pet’s diet history, or on published equations. Nutritionists are trained to think in terms of calories, not volume, and so the volume of the food rarely comes into consideration during the formulation process unless it seems particularly high. Pet owners, on the other hand, tend to think about food in terms of volume, not calories. Especially for pets that were previously fed dry diets, many owners are surprised by the amount of…

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Although food allergies are uncommon in dogs and cats, the only way to diagnose them is with an elimination diet trial. Learn tips to avoid common mistakes and to plan a successful elimination diet trial.

Pet food costs are particularly relevant right now, when the costs of many consumer goods have increased rapidly in the last year, leaving many of us paying more for our food as well as that for our pets. The form of the food fed – dry, wet, fresh, or raw – can have dramatic effects on the cost of feeding. We compare the costs of feeding some popular diets of each type for a day and a year for a medium-large dog.

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