Understanding the nutrients your dog needs

Since the 2008 pet food recall, pet owners have become more concerned about the ingredients in their pets’ foods, and their demands for greater quality have been answered in the marketplace. The cliché “garbage in, garbage out” applies with terrifying validity.

Like yours, your dog’s body consists of cells — a lot of them. Each cell needs 45 nutrients to function properly. The cells need the following nutrients:

 ✓ Protein

 ✓ Carbohydrates

 ✓ Fat

✓ Vitamins

 ✓ Minerals

 ✓ Water

  All these nutrients need to be in the correct proportion for the necessary chemical reactions of digestion, absorption, transportation, and elimination to occur.

If the cells are going to be able to continue to live, the exact composition of the body fluids that bathe the outside of the cells needs to be controlled from moment to moment, day by day, with no more than a few percentage points variation. So feeding a balanced diet daily is critical for Buddy’s overall health.

  These preceding nutrients are the fuel that’s converted into energy. Energy produces heat, and the amount of heat your dog produces determines his ability to control his body temperature. Everything your dog does, from running and playing to working and living a long and healthy life, is determined by the fuel you provide and the energy it produces.

The term calorie is used to measure energy in food. Optimally, every dog will eat the quantity of food he needs to meet his caloric needs. The food you feed must provide the appropriate amount of calories so your dog’s body can:

 ✓ Produce energy to grow correctly

 ✓ Maintain health during adulthood

 ✓ Reproduce

 ✓ Grow into a quality old age

In the following sections, we start off by discussing a puppy’s special nutritional needs, and then we move on to the nutritional needs of all dogs during their adult life. For information on older dogs (8 years old and older).

Meeting puppy’s nutritional needs

In contrast to humans, dogs grow fast. During the first 7 months of Buddy’s life, his birth weight increases anywhere from 15 to 40 times, depending on his breed. By 1 year of age, his birth weight increases 60 times and his skeletal development is almost complete. For strength and proper growth to occur, he needs the right food. He also needs twice the amount of food as an adult while he’s growing, especially during growth spurts. Nutritional deficiencies at an early age, even for short periods, can cause problems later on.

Some of the larger breeds continue to grow until they’re 4 years of age. The most critical period for a puppy is between 2 and 7 months, which is the time of maximum growth. His little body is being severely stressed as his puppy teeth drop out and his adult teeth come in. His adult coat also comes in at this time. He’s growing like a weed, and at the same time his body is being assaulted with vaccines. During this time of growth, Buddy needs the right food so that his immune system can cope with all these demands and onslaughts.

Puppy foods contain more protein than adult or maintenance foods. Manufacturers know that puppies need more protein for growth. Nonetheless, you still need to know the source of the protein — that is, animal or plant. These foods also have to be carefully balanced with calcium, phosphorus, and magnesium. If you choose carefully, you can select a food that’s suitable for a growing puppy (see Figure 4-2) as well as for an adult dog.

Look for a food that has two or three animal proteins in the first five ingredients — or better yet, one that lists animal protein as its first two or three ingredients. Check out foods that are listed for all growth stages or that are specifically designed for puppies.

  If you’re raising a giant breed puppy (one that will mature to weigh over 75 pounds), your choices are limited because little to no research has ever been done by the dog food companies on how to successfully raise these larger dogs. The research that has been done was on dogs weighing 25 to 75 pounds at maturity. In many dog foods, the ratio of calcium, phosphorus, and magnesium is insufficient in relationship to the protein content. So you’ll often hear breeders of these large dogs tell their puppy owners to buy adult foods for their pups to make them grow more slowly. But this is a double-edged sword.

Pups of these breeds don’t get the amount of protein they need to develop correctly, and this malnutrition often leads to structural problems early in life. The later section “Making choices as to how to feed Buddy” can help you avoid this problem.

After you’ve selected a food for young Buddy on the basis of its protein percentage, your job isn’t quite done yet. You also have to check the items we discuss in the following sections, which apply to both puppies and adults.

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