November 1st is National Cook for Your Pet Day. What better way to show your love for your furry family members than a home-cooked meal. The mouthwatering sights and smells of your DIY dog food preparation will make your pup’s day. You’ll never have a more attentive audience for your culinary prowess.
Advantages of Healthy Home Cooking
The food your pet eats, more than any other factor, determines his or her health, happiness, energy level, and longevity. Unfortunately, the traditional pet food industry has sustained itself for too long on false promises, filler ingredients, and an utter lack of transparency.
Cooking at home with healthy dog food recipes is a great way to kick the kibble habit and ensure that your doggy boy or girl gets the nutrition they need and deserve. Health benefits include:
- You know what’s in it: You can’t really tell from the list of ingredients what’s in most commercial dog food. The best example is meat. What cut is it? Where does it come from? What is a meat byproduct? When you prepare homemade dog food, mystery ingredients are eliminated since you know exactly what you’re cooking.
- Whole, human-grade ingredients: You can select and purchase the highest-quality, human-grade ingredients, and lovingly prepare your home-cooked meal under the watchful eye of you-know-who.
- No fillers and preservatives: Fillers add little or no nutritional value and in some cases can be downright harmful. Fresh, whole foods—unlike kibble, dehydrated dog food, canned wet food, or other processed dog food—have no fillers or preservatives.
- Avert allergies: If your dog has allergies or another food-related health challenge, you can avoid allergens since you control all the ingredients that go into your DIY dog food.
It’s All Good. Or Is it?
There are tremendous benefits to cooking homemade dog food. Unfortunately, there are some potential drawbacks as well. In Amy Down’s article, 20 Pros and Cons of Homemade Dog Food Cooking, she lists a few of the potential disadvantages, including:
- Some diets lack nutritional balance.
- You need to be aware of unsafe ingredients.
- Homemade foods may have too many or too few calories.
How do you avoid potential pitfalls like these and ensure that the food you are preparing for your pup is healthy, nutritious, and right for them?
A great way to start is to use a JustFoodForDogs Do-It-Yourself kit. Each DIY dog food kit contains the recipe of one of JustFoodForDogs’ healthy daily meals, a cooking guide for that meal, and a blend of nutrients designed specifically to balance that recipe for long-term feeding. The kit also includes feeding guidelines to ensure that you are feeding the right amount of calories based on your dog’s weight.
There are six different recipes to choose from, and each is fully vetted, having been developed by a staff of specially trained veterinarians. In fact, these are the only homemade dog food recipes available that are proven healthy in feeding trials. So you can rest assured that your home-cooked masterpiece:
- Has no unsafe ingredients
- Is nutritionally balanced, and
- Is geared for your dog’s ideal caloric requirements
November 1st or Any Day
Whether it’s National Cook for Your Pet Day or any day for that matter, it can be fun to prepare a home-cooked meal for your four-legged family member. So pick a recipe, line up your ingredients, and get ready for a tail-wagging good time in the kitchen.
