Commercial Pet Food

What’s really for dinner? The truth about commercial pet food

Due to the recent pet food scares, I feel obligated to use this page to educate our clients, and the public about pet food.

Having worked full-time in the nutritional field for 5 years, I started transferring what I knew about human nutrition to canine nutrition.  Our bodies are very much the same as our canine counterparts (you’ll notice that the drugs they are treated with are very much the same as we take too!)  I had a lot of dog food companies and dog food supplement companies contact me to write their training programs for breeders, and so my journey began…

Having used a lot of dog foods over the last 35 years of breeding…I’ve seen it all.  I’ve loved some, I’ve hated some.  I also have to make it clear that my information contained here will also be specifically geared towards nutrition as it has to do with Labradors.  I have found that Labradors, in general, sometimes seem more sensitive to food allergies than other breeds. Maybe I’m just assuming that based on all the calls and emails I get from all over the country from people (people that don’t even have my dogs!) that have labs with skin and coat allergies.  As soon as I make my food recommendations to them they call or email me later RAVING about the changes in their dogs…you would not believe how many people call me with labs that have “hot spots”, and when I proceed to ask them what they are feeding their dogs they tell me something like “Dad’s”… about the equivalent of feeding twinkies to your dogs, basically!  It’s cheap, and you get what you pay for… junk. You know how YOUR body reacts if you feed it twinkies everyday… and the medical field has proven how much our health is tied to nutrition. How many diseases and disorders are merely nutritional deficiencies in our bodies?? Plain and simple.

Cancer: Frankly, I’m appalled at how proliferate this is in the breed.  I don’t know if I have just had good luck or what… but it has never been a genetic issue in our labs here.  BUT, I do know that we have pumped our dogs full of antioxidants and gluten free food.  Oncologists actually put dogs on wheat/gluten free food to prevent cancer, or if they are already predisposed to cancer.  It is also low carb, so you will not struggle with weight problems either. Basically corn and wheat were originally used in pet foods as a cheaper source of filler than the wheat protein was.  Many people prefer to not feed carbs because for one thing, cancer cells FEED OFF OF CARBS.  In humans, the nations with higher carb consumption have a higher cancer rate.  It’s FACT.  Lower the carbs, and lower your risk for cancer, diabetes, etc.  All things our dogs get as well.  They digest proteins and herbs/plants much better—that is what they were designed to digest.  Wild dogs are carnivorous, BUT they also graze on greens (herbs, etc)… AND their prey are typically small herbivores, which means they are getting partially digested vegetation as well (kind of gross, I know).