Homemade Diet For Diabetic Dogs – Make nutritious dog food at home using familiar whole food ingredients! Your fur will love his homemade diet and you’ll love the ease of cooking and recipe creation with my friendly guide.
He is a purebred, born from a line of AKC champion pugs, but with the hereditary joint diseases typical of overbred “perfect” pugs.
Homemade Diet For Diabetic Dogs
Don’t get me wrong; Viga is perfect in every way and I wouldn’t trade him for anything. But especially in recent years raising her has taught me a lot about dog health and nutrition as both my girls have settled into their senior years.
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Shortly before turning 8, Bug began to show signs of degenerative joint disease. Her hips gave a little with each walk.
He grew up in one-story homes with hard floors, and after moving into our original 1920s bungalow, the split-level rooms and terraced yard seemed to worsen his condition.
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Over the years, his weak hips eventually gave out and he lost the use of both back legs.
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At home, he moves with his front legs dragging his body. (He has the strongest front legs of any dog I know!)
When she’s out, she rolls around in a dog wheelchair and we can barely keep up with her. I almost expect her wheelchair to have flame stickers!
If you saw him just sitting, you wouldn’t know he had a disability. She is full of smiles and high spirits and doesn’t seem to understand that she can’t walk on all fours like her sister. He’s still a quick little thing, especially when it’s mealtime or a beach day!
However, the error was not always like that. The month her hip dysplasia finally progressed, she was weak, tired, frustrated, and for a moment we thought we were going to lose her.
Recipe: Healthy Homemade Diet For Dogs
Because she no longer controlled her hips to squat and go potty, she became incontinent for a few weeks. Given his age and the fact that he had no joint pain (just lameness), we decided to skip any corrective surgery and take a more holistic approach to his condition.
Ever since I started raising my own dogs, I’ve always wanted to cook them at home, but thought it would be too expensive or too time-consuming or that they wouldn’t get the nutrition they needed.
During Bug’s canine depression month, I vowed to make his precious life (or what I thought might be the last stage) as comfortable as possible.
Both of my pugs had a number of health issues growing up which I unfortunately discovered were common for the breed.
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My senior had persistent hot spots and itching that no over the counter dog food would cure (and I’ve tried them all, from grain free kibble to lamb, veal, fish and lots of other things he would just spit out).
Bug was overweight for a while when he was younger, even though he ate the recommended amount of food for his target weight. I finally settled on Wellness kibbles and they did well with this brand.
But I wanted to explore other options. I wanted to give them real food—fresh, nutritious ingredients that I recognized and could even eat myself.
I mentioned in my post about homemade whole grain chicken feed that the whole household (people, dogs and chickens) share the same whole grains and seeds we buy in bulk, as well as the goodness from our edible garden. .
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Everything our animals eat, we can eat. (Well, I’ll admit that fig beetles and other bugs aren’t our thing, but our chickens love it!)
For homemade chicken feed, we stick to a proven formula that works for every layer: 16 to 17 percent protein (determined with my chicken feed calculator), vitamins, minerals and amino acids, a wide variety of grains and seeds, and free range for weeds, greens and insects.
These numbers will vary depending on the age of your chickens, but it’s easy to create a diet within these parameters for optimal health and egg production.
As with humans, dogs’ nutritional needs can vary wildly depending on age, breed, health history, and activity level. What works for one dog may not work for another.
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When I first started thinking about this post, I was almost hesitant to share my homemade dog food recipe because it’s so tailored to my pugs’ needs.
However, I wanted to show other dog owners that homemade, wholesome and healthy food is possible and it doesn’t take much more time than preparing food at home.
Depending on how many dogs you have and how much they eat, you may only need to cook them once or twice a week.
My DIY dog food recipe is more of a general guideline than an exact meal plan that I follow each week. My dogs diet changes just like ours, depending on what we do and what we buy or grow.
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The protein is always meat and usually chicken, although we have also used turkey, pork and beef. We feed all parts of the animals, but mostly we fry chicken breast or tripe in coconut oil and ground turmeric.
Coconut oil has many health benefits for dogs, such as improving skin and coat, increasing energy, aiding digestion, reducing allergic reactions, promoting wound healing, preventing yeast and fungal infections, and supporting arthritis or ligament problems.
Turmeric has long been studied for its powerful medicinal properties, including its use as an antioxidant and anti-inflammatory agent.
We add it to coconut oil as it is fat soluble and use it to support joint health in our pugs. (Turmeric-spiced dark-meat chicken is very tasty for dogs!)
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Speaking of dark meat, we feed thighs and breasts alternately. While we remove the skin from poultry and remove excess fat from red meat, we don’t worry about buying the leanest meat possible for our dogs.
A little fat is needed for complete nutrition. (If your dog has a tendency to be overweight, you may want to stick to lean meat only.)
Raw vegetables come from whatever is currently growing in our garden. Sometimes we even throw in a few pieces of fruit, like in the fall when cranberries are in season. (Bug has a history of urinary tract infections, so we usually give him a cranberry supplement as a preventative measure.)
We change the vegetables every week so the pugs don’t eat too much of any one thing. In one meal, they can have broccoli, celery, fava bean leaves, radishes and nasturtiums. Sometimes we pick apples, bananas or feijoas from the trees… and even herbs like lettuce, basil or parsley.
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This component provides fiber to support digestive health, as well as antioxidants and phytonutrients. In general, the darker the vegetable, the better it is nutritionally.
We feed our dogs all the same vegetables we feed ourselves, including black kale, purple carrots, and green romanesco broccoli. They are garden eaters just like us!
(But please don’t feel like you have to get fancy for your homemade dog food recipe—we can just give our pets whatever excess grows in our garden.)
While this may seem like a lot, remember that you only need small amounts of each vegetable – a couple of broccoli florets or stalks, a stick of celery, a small handful of carrot tops.
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These tend to be “leftovers” from our produce box, so we never have to buy, say, a whole head of cauliflower just for the dogs.
We usually focus on broccoli and broccoli leaves as our main vegetables because they are exceptionally nutritious (especially the leaves of this plant, which we grow in abundance at home).
A recent peer-reviewed medical study found that sulforaphane, a compound found in broccoli, helps slow the progression of osteoarthritis.
Other cruciferous vegetables such as cabbage and Brussels sprouts also contain small amounts of sulforaphane, but it is most abundant in broccoli. In our household with two aging dogs, joint health is a priority.
Healthy Homemade Dog Food Recipe
Onions (and related alliums such as leeks and garlic) are fed to our dogs, which contain a toxic compound called thiosulfate. Even when ingested in small amounts, thiosulfate can damage a dog’s red blood cells and cause hemolytic anemia.
Complex carbs usually come from brown rice, wild rice (or any number of Asian rices my husband and I make at home, like red or black rice), oats, lentils, split peas, or starchy vegetables like potatoes, sweet potatoes, and winter squash. squash. In particular, wild rice, split peas and lentils have the advantage of being high in protein.
These complex carbohydrates provide energy and aid in digestive function, so don’t just think of them as filler. We change this component every week to provide variety, and sometimes combine the grain with a starchy vegetable (for example, brown rice with sweet potatoes).
Fats and
