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Kategorie: Finding the Best Food for Your Pet
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Veterinarian Recommended Pet Foods: What You Need to Know
Many pet food companies prominently feature the „veterinarian recommended“ label, enticing families seeking the best food for their pets. However, what exactly this label means and how it can help you to make an informed choice can be a bit of a mystery. In this post, we’ll cover what the regulations are for products bearing the “veterinarian recommended” claim. -
What’s in a name? What is a Board Certified Veterinary Nutritionist and why does it matter?
We know that many pet owners are desperate for accurate, trustworthy information about how to feed their pets, whether they’re healthy or if they have a medical condition. However, even knowing who to talk to about your pet’s nutrition can be confusing! Learn more about Board Certified Veterinary Nutritionists and an easier way to find one. -
What Nutritionists Wish You Knew: 5 Homecooked Diet Mistakes & Misconceptions
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… -
What’s the Best Diet for Dogs with Chronic Diarrhea?
Chronic diarrhea is one of the most frustrating medical conditions for both dog owners and veterinarians (and especially for us veterinary nutritionists!) However, while it can be challenging to find the optimal diet for a dog with chronic diarrhea, it’s worth the extra effort! -
Diet-associated dilated cardiomyopathy: The cause is not yet known but it hasn’t gone away
A new FDA update provides more information on diet-associated dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM). While the specific cause is not yet known, the problem hasn’t gone away -
Too hot? Too cold? Keeping your pet’s food temperature just right
Anyone who has lived with a cat or dog with medical issues knows that maintaining a good appetite can be challenging and that weight and muscle loss can occur as a result. Reduced food intake is not only distressing to owners but also has negative effects for the pet. When healthy pets lose weight, they mostly lose fat. However, elderly pets or pets with medical issues that lose weight mostly lose muscle. Muscle loss is bad for pets (as it is for people) because it can reduce strength, immune function, and wound healing, and can even shorten a pet’s lifespan. Many things affect pets’ appetite and food intake, such as sense of smell and taste, food properties (nutrient levels, aroma, flavor, texture), medical issues, dental disease, pain, competition between animals, and medications. Many chronic diseases, such as heart or kidney disease, can affect appetite. But even healthy older animals can have reduced appetite. Older people’s less sensitive taste and smell perception can reduce appetite; while we suspect this also occurs in dogs and cats as they age, this has not been well studied. One approach to helping animals’ appetite is to adjust the temperature of the food. An interesting study was published recently in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior.1 Researchers studied older cats’ preferences for wet foods at different temperatures. Thirty-two healthy older cats took part in the study. All cats were over 8 years of age (up to 14 years, with an average age of 11 years). This was a carefully-designed study using a single “chunks in gravy” style commercial canned food. The temperatures tested were 43°F (the temperature of food coming out of the refrigerator), 70°F (room temperature), and 99°F (warmed). Cats were tested in a two-bowl test where they could select the food they preferred in two… -
“Preservative-Free” Pet Food?
Preservatives are essential ingredients in some forms of pet foods but they are surrounded by a great deal of misinformation. -
Test your Nutrition Know-How for Cats with Kidney Disease
How confident are you in your knowledge of how to best feed cats with chronic kidney disease? Take our quiz to find out whether your confidence is well-placed! -
Comparing kitty’s calorie costs
The type of your cat food – wet, dry, fresh, or raw – not to mention the brand, can make a dramatic differences in what you will pay to feed your cat. We compare daily and yearly costs for different food types for a theor -
Think Your Pet has a Food Allergy? Eliminating Mistakes in Elimination Diet Trials
Although food allergies are quite uncommon, they can sometimes occur in dogs and cats that have year-round skin issues (not seasonal) or chronic gastrointestinal problems. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to diagnosis them. Blood or saliva tests may be appealing as an easy way to diagnose food allergy, but they are highly inaccurate so don’t waste your money on them! The only way to diagnose a food allergy is with elimination diet trial. To do an elimination diet trial, you must feed your pet ONLY a veterinary diet specifically designed for elimination diet trials for the prescribed period of time. Before you consider doing an elimination diet trial to diagnose food allergy, you should know up front that they are not easy (you’ll see why as you read on), so you don’t want to go through it more than once. Most veterinary specialists recommend an elimination diet trial of at least 8-12 weeks for pets with skin issues and 3-4 weeks for those with digestive issues. Therefore, my philosophy is to make sure that the trial is carefully done with the right diet, for the right length of time, and without making common mistakes. That way, if your pet’s symptoms improve, then your pet may have a food allergy (there are more steps to take), but if your pet doesn’t get significantly better during an elimination diet trial, food allergy is even less likely to be the cause of your pet’s problem and you can move on to other, more likely causes of skin or digestive issues. Elimination diet options There are two main approaches to the diet used for an elimination diet trial: Novel ingredient diets A novel ingredient diet is one that contains ingredients your pet has never eaten before. They aren’t inherently less allergenic – they’re just…