Corn is a popular grain found in commercial dog foods primarily because of its price.
Soy is another carbohydrate that is found in some foods. Once you have selected a food on the basis of its protein percentage, your job isn’t quite done. You have to check a few other items.
He doesn’t need many carbohydrates to be healthy, but he does require some grains and vegetables for energy, proper digestion, stool formation and the correct functioning of the thyroid gland. Your dog also needs carbohydrates.
Oats, wheat, barley and brown rice are whole grains that contain a lot of vitamins and minerals as well as protein and fat.
Soy admittedly is high in protein, but it binds up other nutrients and makes them unavailable for absorption. Stay away from dog foods that contains soy-it’s best fed to those animals that have four stomachs or birds with gizzards to digest it.
The heat process destroys many of the vitamins and minerals contained in grains.
Carbohydrates have to be broken down for a dog to be able to digest them. Dog food companies use a heat process to do this and therein lies the problem.
A question that comes immediately to mind is, “Where do dogs in the wild get the grains and vegetables they need?” The answer is, from the intestines of their prey, all nearly predigested, and the dog can utilize them.
They also build up tartar on your dog’s teeth, making his gums sore and his breath smell. A diet low in carbohydrates and high in protein is an ideal diet for you dog.
Diets high in carbohydrates take a long time to digest, produce voluminous, smelly stools and gas.
NOT ALL FATS ARE CREATED EQUAL
Saturated fat comes from animal sources and is used for energy, For food has to be high in animal (saturated) fat. Fat is either saturated or polyunsaturated and your dog needs both. Together these fats supply the essential fatty acids (EFAs) necessary to maintain a dog’s good health. However, moderation is the key.
The diet needs to have some animal fat but not too much, and anything between 15% to 18% is okay. Dogs do not suffer from heart disease caused by higher levels of animal fat, or from fatty deposits in blood vessels.
Excess animal fats in the diet creates:
Obesity
Your dog needs polyunsaturated fat for healthy skin and coat. If your dog has a dry coat, you may need to add some oil to his food. Polyunsaturated fat comes from vegetable sources, such as flax seed oil, saf-flower oil, wheat germ oil, olive oil.
Linoleic acid is one of the three essential acids found in polyunsaturated fats that has to be provided daily in your dog’s food. Cold-pressed safflower and flax seed oil provide the best source of lonoleic acid and are the least allergenic. They are better than corn oil that contains only a tiny amount of linoleic acid. Lack of polyunsaturated fat can cause:
- Skin ulcerations and infections
- Poor blood clotting
- Extreme itching and scratching
- Coarse dry coat
- Improper growth
- Skin lesion on belly, inside the back legs, and between shoulder blades
- Thickened areas of skin
- Horny skin growths
Note: Flax seed oil can be difficult for some dogs to digest.
WHAT ELSE IS IN HERE?
If a fat is preserved with these chemicals, it will have a long shelf life and be generally unaffected by heat and light. The manufacturers choose how to preserve the fat in dog food to prevent it from becoming rancid. They can use the chemical BHA, BHT, ethoxyquin or propylgallate. Even so, many of us prefer not to feed these preservatives to our dogs, especially ethoxyquin.
Manufacturers can also choose natural preservatives, such as vitamin C and E. Vitamin E is usually listed as tocopherol. The down side to these preservatives is a shorter shelf life-no more than six months.
Your dog’s food needs vitamins to release the nutrients and enxymes in it his body can absorb and use them. If vitamins are destroyed by heat, it doesn’t make any difference how much you put in the food-they will still be destroyed.
We also learned that the finished product was not tested by more than 99% of the manufacturers. They acknowledged awareness of the damage posed by the heat process and to overcome it, added more vitamins to the food to make up the difference.
In other words, a substantial quantity of vitamins and minerals go into the food, but what quantity actually reaches your dog seems as much a mystery to the manufacturer as it is to us.
Next: Vitamins & Minerals
