The best kind of dog food for puppies would contain essential nutrients and supplements. The right combination of supplements will act like natural dog remedies.

Most Important Choice For Your Puppy

Choosing the best food for your puppy is one of the most important choices you will make to ensure your new family member has a long and healthy life. By feeding a carefully balanced ration of vitamins, essential nutrients, digestive enzymes and soil based organisms to your puppy, you can help him or her get the utmost nutritional value from their meals, which can impact growth, development, brain function, behavior and have life-long health benefits.

Choosing the right diet for your puppy can be made difficult by the plethora of feeding options, brands and choices that exist.

Different Types Of Diets for your Puppy

Puppies and adult dogs have traditionally been fed a commercial diet, either dry or canned food. While that remains a popular option, more recently raw and home cooked diets have become more common. All three of these basic options have pros and cons that make choosing between them something that requires careful research on the part of the pet owner to make the right decision for their puppy.

Commercially prepared dog foods have long been the standard type of food fed to dogs, and it continues to be the most common type of food given to dogs. However, not all commercially prepared dog foods are created equal. It is vital to closely examine potential foods to help you decide which food is the best for your puppy. Click here for our top recommendations for dog food.

When looking at commercial dog foods, the name of the food is quite important. A diet named for it’s primary ingredient such as “beef dog food”, must contain at least 70% of the total weight of the food. However, if the food is named “beef formula” or “beef dinner”, the main ingredient may be as little as 25% of the weight of the food. The rest of the content may be from filler with little or no nutritional value.

What are Animal By-Products?

The use of by-products in commercial dog food is very common. By-products are parts of meat that are unfit for human consumption, such as the feet, intestines and organs, or diseased animals. Ingredients billed as crude protein are generally made from the hair, hooves and tendons of animals, as well as beaks and feathers of chickens. While these ingredients may boost the protein content of a food, very little of this protein can be absorbed by the dogs digestive system.

Reading Labels

Unfortunately, reading the label of dog foods is not much help in determining what is in the food. Unlike human food labels, the government allows pet food manufacturers to list the first five ingredients in any order they please. Pet food labels are misleading, but in a good quality dog food, the very first ingredient should be meat, and not meat by-products or any other type of carbohydrate or protein source.

Organic foods, utilizing organically grown or derived ingredients, fall into two categories. Foods whose label reads “made with organic ingredients” must contain at least 70% organic ingredients, while foods labeled simply “organic” must contain at least 95% organic ingredients. However, while organic foods are typically made with higher-quality ingredients, they are not necessarily better. Careful scrutiny of the ingredient list is still necessary to see if the food passes the meat test (meat being the first ingredient), and to ensure no by-products are used in the food.

The Best Food Is Not Good Enough

So you’ve done your research, selected the best kind of dog food for puppies that you can find. You’re done, right? Wrong! You can feed the best food in the world, but alone it cannot provide your puppy with the tools necessary to allow him to fully digest and utilize the ingredients in the food.

A powerful source of anti-oxidants, immune system enhancers, and naturally occurring vitamins will enhance the nutritional value of your puppies food, and help him to build a stronger immune system, prevent tissue damage in the body, and build your puppies foundation for a healthy digestive tract, skin, coat and joints for life.

Home Cooked Dog Food

Recently, meals prepared fresh at home have started increasing in popularity. The advantages of home-cooked diets include complete control over the quality and type of ingredients in a diet, giving the dog owner peace of mind and providing the dog a fresh-made, nutritious and delicious meal! Another type of home-prepared meal gaining popularity over commercially prepared foods is a raw-food diet, comprised of fresh, unprocessed meats.

Many books are available to help you formulate a balanced home-prepared meal for your puppy. A holistic veterinarian is also a fantastic resource if you have questions about the nutritional value of the food you are preparing.

Whether you choose to buy commercially prepared foods, or make fresh meals at home, after you have selected the best food for your puppy you can ensure that your puppy will receive the best nutritional value and vitamin and mineral balance.

If you have been looking for the best kind of dog food for puppies, reach out to us today for more information.

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