Ensuring that your dog’s diet is fortified with vitamins and minerals

Your dog needs vitamins and minerals in his food to release the nutrients and enzymes from the ingested food so his body can break down food and absorb its nutrients.

When researching our book The Holistic Guide for a Healthy Dog, 2nd Edition (Howell Book House), we called dog food manufacturers that produced kibble to ask them about their source of vitamins and minerals and how they protected them against destruction from the heat process. Their responses were astonishing.

They acknowledged awareness of the problem and said that to overcome it, they added more vitamins to the food to make up the difference. Of course, doing so is nonsense. If vitamins are destroyed by heat, it doesn’t make any difference how much you put in the food. They’ll still be destroyed.We also discovered that most of the finished products weren’t tested as to their vitamin and mineral content after being made. This lack of testing also applies to many of the raw and frozen diets in the marketplace. In other words, vitamins and minerals go into the food, but what actually reaches your dog seems as much a mystery to some of the manufacturers as it is to us.

  Two types of vitamins exist:

 ✓ Water-soluble: Vitamins B and C, which are water-soluble, are necessary for the breakdown of protein and many other chemical processes in the body. Any excess is filtered through the kidneys and urinated out between four to eight hours after ingestion. For this reason, these vitamins must be present in each meal.

 ✓ Fat-soluble: Vitamins A, D, E, and K are fat-soluble and stored in the fatty tissues of the body and the liver.

Your dog needs both types of vitamins. Your dog’s overall health is dependent on the availability of both vitamins and minerals in a usable form. So, you need to add these to any kind of commercial kibble, to canned food, and to some of the frozen and raw diets. We recommend the all-in-one food supplement Endurance, which we discuss later in the chapter.

Minerals make up less than 2 percent of any formulated diet, and yet they’re the most critical of nutrients. The minerals are needed to

 ✓ Correctly compose body fluids

 ✓ Form blood and bones

 ✓ Promote a healthy nervous system

 ✓ Function as coenzymes together with vitamins

Although your dog can manufacture some vitamins on his own, he isn’t able to make minerals. So you need to add them to his diet with a product like the balanced, all-in-one supplement, Endurance. Trying to supplement your dog’s food by using individual vitamins and minerals isn’t a good idea. To do supplement properly, you would need to have a lot of experience in clinical nutrition. Instead, we suggest using Endurance. This product is available through www.volhard.com.

  Vitamins and minerals begin to break down when you open a bag of dog food and expose the food to the elements. So make sure you close the food tightly and keep it away from light. Doing so helps to retain the quality of the contents. (Vitamins B and C are particularly sensitive to exposure.)

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