According to a 10-year study, the right diet paired with optimal care, can lengthen your pet’s life. Here are some of the top takeaways from the survey that can help ensure you’re keeping your pets as healthy as humanly possible.

Tips for healthy pet diets

1. Understand how much food your pet really needs

It’s super important to take the amount of food you’re feeding your pet into consideration. How much you should feed them depends on the type of food, how often they eat, their size, metabolic rate, and exercise levels. While not feeding them enough can cause deficiencies, over-feeding can lead to obvious health problems like obesity, which leads to a plethora of other issues like arthritis and congestive heart failure.

2. Keep your pet’s life stage in mind

A puppy or kitten doesn’t have the same dietary requirements as a senior dog or a wise old cat. Pups need a lot of protein, specific minerals, vitamins, and fats to grow. Senior dogs need to consume fewer calories but higher quality proteins in order to maintain body condition while also putting minimal stress on the kidneys. Because older pets have a slower metabolic rate, you need to provide them with healthy pet diets choices to help prevent obesity.

3. Always opt for the best treats money can buy

All pets love treats, but the quality of the treats you’re feeding them also needs to be carefully considered. Go for picks that are low in fat and sodium. If you can’t find suitable treats on the shelves, you can always serve them some fresh fruits and veggies.

4. Make sure they always have access to fresh water

Although it’s essential to focus on healthy pet diets, you also need to keep things in the balance. You can do this by ensuring they drink enough water. Just like you need to consume a minimum amount of water per day to stay healthy, the same rings true for your pet. Always make sure their water bowl is full and easily accessible.

Final thoughts

Maintaining a healthy and nutritional diet for your pets is essential if you want them to lead long, happy lives. With a little research and advice from your vet and other trusted sources like Petz, healthy pet diets won’t be something you struggle to maintain!

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Age-appropriate diet considerations for each stage of your dog’s life

Puppy

Your vet might recommend the best puppy food according to your dog’s breed, size, and health status. It’s super important to get your pup off on a high-quality nutritional regimen that’ll lay a strong foundation for good health throughout their life. A puppy needs much more calories than adult or senior dogs. You also need to ensure that their age-appropriate diet delivers the right balance of animal proteins, high-quality fats, and critical nutrients to support early development.

Recommended Product:

We’re big fans of the Hills Science Plan range of puppy foods for small and mini, medium, and large breed pups since each line has been formulated with breed-specific health problems in mind, and as such, helps to counteract health problems.

Adult Dog

When your dog reaches the age of 12-18 months old, they’re developmentally matured and officially enter the stage of adulthood. Growth spurts will have rounded out by this time, so your furry friends need a solid nutritional foundation to stay in good health. An age-appropriate diet can help support overall health and increase your dog’s life expectancy while covering all the crucial things like immunity, dental health, skin and coat, and digestive health.

Recommended Product:

If you’re not looking to buy something specific to your dog’s breed, we recommend Montego Adult Dog Food. Montego Adult is suitable for small and medium breeds from the age of 1, but for larger breeds, it’s best to only start them on Montego Adult when they’re around 2 years old.

The Golden Years

As your dog approaches his or her senior years, you’ll have to start implementing an age-appropriate diet. When your dog reaches this stage depends on his breed size and weight since larger breeds live shorter lives than smaller breeds. Your senior dog needs fewer minerals in her food to protect her kidneys.

Recommended Product:

Vets Choice Golden Years is an excellent choice for mature dogs from the age of 7 years for small and medium breeds and 7 years for large and giant breeds. With added barley and glucose modulation, this option assists with weight control and metabolic processes. It also contains balanced Omega 3 & 6 fatty acids to enhance your dog’s skin and coat.

Final thoughts

All dogs need specially formulated foods according to their breed size and genetic makeup. Not just as preventative nutrition, but also to support their ageing process. The varieties we’ve covered here will ensure your furry friend gets balanced nutrition throughout their life to maintain good health and quality lifestyle!

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How important is animal-based protein really?

To put it simply: it’s absolutely vital. Dogs have consumed meat for thousands of years, so their digestive systems have evolved to use all the amino acids and minerals found in animal-based protein. The amino acids are used as building blocks for muscle, organ and skeletal health and development. The nutrients nourish their bodies and help repair cell damage. It’s also their main source of energy.

While there’s a lot of debate on the pros and cons of animal-based protein vs the plant-based option, we believe that plants just aren’t as nourishing for pets. Dogs can follow a vegetarian diet, but animal-based protein contains higher levels of amino acids.

Cats, on the other hand, are obligate carnivores, so they HAVE to consume meat to thrive. Their digestive systems simply aren’t suited to plant-based diets. Plants do not contain enough Taurine, but animal protein has more than enough of this amino acid.

What are the best kinds of animal-based protein?

You really want to ensure you’re giving your pet high-quality protein, so when choosing your pet food, it’s ideal to have the protein source listed as the first ingredient. Free-range protein (and the kind fit for human consumption) provides the best nutritional value.  Here’s a quick look at your options:

Chicken

This is probably the most popular pet food option and might also be the most affordable. Chicken offers a high ratio of unsaturated to saturated fats, so it’s a very digestible energy source. This lean meat option is also a source of Chondroitin, a joint health nutrient for pets.

Beef

Beef is also common in pet foods and contains a lot of nutrients like vitamin B, iron and zinc. If you have a pet suffering from renal problems, beef might not be the most ideal choice. All in all, beef is loved among pets for its great taste.

Lamb

Free-range lamb is rich in Omega 3 and 6 and contains a lot of vitamin B. it’s also a source of selenium and zinc. Thanks to lamb’s fat content, it’s often recommended for dogs that need to gain a little weight and those that need more energy.

Ostrich and venison

Just like lamb, ostrich and venison animal-based protein are lean choices and offer high-quality nutrition. These are “novel” proteins, so they’re awesome for pets prone to food allergies or intolerances.

Fish

Fish is, as you might have guessed, great for all pets, but cats love it fiercely. The protein source is low in fat and rich in vitamins minerals and omegas, making it a great option for pets that are predisposed to allergies.

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Pet food labels checklist

Ingredients are listed in order of weight

In general, pet food labels feature ingredient lists that are listed according to their weight. It’s good if ingredients feature meats in the top two lines since this means the food contains adequate amounts of protein.

Specific proteins

Ingredients like “meat” or “poultry” almost always indicates that animal offcuts have been used in the recipe whereas specific mentions like “chicken” and “tuna” indicates the use of real protein, not by-products. Your pet’s food should also be free from preservatives and colourants, but that kind of goes without saying.

Seek out the Omegas

Omega 3 and 6 can be found in most pet foods, but it’s important to look for pet foods that contain extra Omega 3 from high-quality fish sources. Domestic pets can’t process Omega 3 if it comes from sources lime sunflower, coconut and canola oils, but they can process the fish-derived kind.

Make sure the recipe has been analysed

Most respectable pet food brands come with the assurance of Guaranteed Analysis, and it’s something you need to pay attention to in pet food labels. In most cases, pet food brands are required to guarantee minimum percentages of crude values including protein, fat, fibre and moisture in their recipes. The term crude refers to chemical analysis and not the actual percentages in the food but can be used to help compare brands.

Feeding directions are important, even if you’ve been a pet owner all your life!

The feeding direction at the back of pet food products should be used as rough guidelines for feeding your pet. Obviously, other aspects like your pet’s breed, activity levels and temperament also come into play when determining how much and when to feed them.

Final word

Remember that our market is literally saturated with an abundance of great pet food options. From Lukono to Eukanuba and everything in between, everyone has their own idea of what’s best for their fur kid. But to be perfectly honest, there’s no such thing as the perfect brand. Don’t be afraid to switch up your pet’s food if and when the need calls for it. Some pets need higher fat and protein than others, and as your pet ages, his or her nutritional needs will probably also mature and change. It’s always best to consult with your vet before making any dietary changes to your pet’s routine as it can negatively impact their wellbeing.

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In the U.S alone, the pet food industry makes a whopping R143 billion per year. And they want us to believe that they’re adding rice and chicken and veggies to their brand. But then again, there’s a difference between what consumers that they’re buying and what they’re really getting.

WARNING: If you’re a sensitive person, you might not want to read this. But for all goals and purposes, it really is worth it to know the truth. That way, you’ll be able to make better choice about your pet’s food in the future.

The truth about pet food ingredients

You might not know this, but the pet food industry is just an extension of the human food and agriculture industries. It effectively provides a market for offal, grains that aren’t fit for human diets, and waste products to be turned into profit.

It wasn’t too long ago that authorities questioned Nestlé, Heinz and Hill’s Science Diet Pet Food in the U.S about what goes into their animal foods. But while a lot of the manufacturers use poor quality ingredients, not all of them are the same. There are quite a lot of honest-to-goodness companies that go above and beyond the call of duty to ensure they produce quality dog and cat food.

The price of pet food is often a great indicator if the overall quality of the product. It’s impossible for a company to sell a generic brand of food at R40 per 1.5kg to use quality proteins and grains in their food. The cost of obtaining those quality ingredients would obviously be much more than their selling price.

Main ingredients in cat and dog food

After the slaughtering process for human food production, the “waste”, or remaining carcass is what they use for the production of pet food. These ingredients are known as by-products, meal, or by-product meal.

By-products

By-products found in dog and cat food are clean, non-rendered “parts”, derived from slaughtered mammals. It includes, but isn’t limited to:

• Lungs
• Spleen
• Kidneys
• Brain
• Blood
• Bone
• Fatty tissue
• Stomachs
• Intestines freed of their contents

Meat Meal

The meat “meal” used to manufacture food for pets are meat tissues, exclusive of blood. These include, but are not limited to:

• Hair
• Hoofs
• Hide trimmings
• Manure
• Stomach and rumen content

Additives

In addition to by-products and “meal”, there are some other harmful ingredients in pet foods that you should avoid. These include:

• Corn syrup
• Propylene glycol
• MSG
• Preservatives like BHA, BHT, sodium, nitrate and nitrite

The ingredients in cat and dog food are considered “unfit for human consumption.” But if we can’t eat it, why are we feeding it to our pets? Shouldn’t we all be choosing more natural foods for our pets? As humans, we’re becoming more aware of how harmful dietary preservatives and synthetic chemicals are impacting our overall wellbeing. So why doesn’t the same hold true for our pets?

Here at Petz.co.za, we are committed to delivering the very best quality pet food. Get in touch with us today to learn more about our range of pawsome pet food and products!

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