neogeo0823 posted:

Hey thread. I'm looking into the viability of feeding my senior dog home cooked food instead of dry kibble, but I'm getting inconsistencies in some things. Can you guys help me out here?

So, necessary preface first: I've got an 11 year old, 50lb pit bull. She's got a wheat allergy, and I've been feeding her Rachel Ray's Nutrish Chicken & Rice dry food basically all her life. She likes it well enough, except when the bag gets near the end, she'll start to not want to eat it. I assume the food's going stale and she's put off by the taste, because once I buy the new bag, she's right back to eating it just fine again. However, this last bag, I think it must've been a bad batch, or she ate something on a walk that didn't agree with her, or something. Due to whatever happened, she spent a full week with escalating, terrible poop issues that got worse until I swapped her to plain canned chicken, white rice, and canned pumpkin for a couple days to let her clear out and reset. So now I'm looking into the feasibility of home cooking her food, mostly to see if it might be worth it, and if she'd get more out of it than the kibble.

I did a bunch of googling around, and came up with a recipe I wanted to use as a starting point. I independently found that BalanceIt site that's linked in the OP, and it's left me with more questions than when I started. Here's the recipe I initially input. Please note: this is for a 50lb dog, set to a batch size of one week, and selected for the "Higher Protein or Fat & Lower Carb" meal type, in case you're interested in recreating the recipe yourself. I chose that meal type merely due to the fewer vitamin deficiencies it listed. If I were to go through with this, I'd obviously talk to her vet first. I merely want to get an idea of what I'm looking at before I do that, so I have enough information to have a proper conversation on the matter and know what questions to ask and all that.

So, once I get everything listed in there, I started looking for ways to correct the various listed nutrient deficiencies. For example, the site lists the recipe as being low in calcium. One of my ingredients in there is eggs. I figured I could take a couple shells, bake them, grind them into powder, and supplement the calcium that way. Googling around seems to confirm this. Doing the math, I'd need ~4-5 eggshells to cover a whole batch of food. However, that site doesn't have eggshells as an ingredient, so I can't add it to the list to factor that in. Another example is iodine. Seeing that deficiency, I planned on adding kombu to the recipe, as I know that seaweed is very high in iodine. The site lets me add kombu(as kelp) to the recipe, but then tells me there's still no iodine in there at all. This is because, surprise, it doesn't list iodine as a nutrient in any of the seaweeds it has on file. Ok, another deficiency is vitamin E. Google says there's vitamin E in eggs, spinach, and soybean oil. Ok, maybe it's not enough between the three things. Google also says that good sources of vitamin E are, among others, sunflower seeds and red bell peppers. BI doesn't even have sunflower seeds as an ingredient, and when I add red bell peppers to the list, it doesn't look like it moves the nutrient amount at all.

So, what's going on here? I can't seem to get fewer than 6 nutrient deficiencies from this site. I get that they're trying to sell their vitamin powder here, but, come on. Like with the iodine, Google also says your average large chicken egg, the same ones I have in the recipe, each contain ~24mcg of iodine. When you math it out, the recipe the site made calls for just about 3 eggs per day, so there should be ~75mcg of iodine, which is equal to 0.075mg of iodine. Yet the iodine level listed in the nutrition section is listed at 0.002mg for reasons.

And this also isn't helping the whole point of the project anyway, which is to look into the feasibility of actually home cooking my dog's food for the last few years she's got here. I'm really thinking this almost isn't worth the hassle at this point. I dunno, please give me some opinions on this stuff, and help me figure out what to do from here. Should I even bother wrestling with this any more, or quit while I'm ahead and just keep feeding her the kibble, or what?