🥦 Easily Freshen Up Your Bowl 🥩
It's Raw Feeding Week and we know sometimes raw feeding can seem a bit scary or overwhelming for many pet parents! If you've never fed raw food to your furry family and you've never been told just how easy it can be, you may have stayed away from it. We want to make sure, regardless of what you're feeding, you can see just how easy it can be to freshen up your bowl with either raw food, or fresh whole foods that are not only tasty for the furry guys but huge health boosts to their diets! Check out our easy tips on adding some fresh food to your furry family's diet and be confident knowing, raw does not have to be all or nothing, any raw is better than no raw!
👍 Easy Ways to Introduce Raw into Your Pet's Diet
Including raw food for your furry guy doesn't mean a complete overhaul of your floof's diet overnight. It's about making gradual, meaningful additions. Here are some easy ways to start:
🐟 Sardines: A small but mighty source of omega-3 fatty acids for skin, coat, and joint health. Sardines can easily contribute to a healthy diet by being a portion of the meal. Add a sardine to your floof's bowl and easily beat up on cancer, relieve allergies, lose weight or even suppress seizures! Aside from all of those amazing health benefits, sardines are an easy way to start including fresh, whole foods into the diet! If you want to see how many sardines your furry family should have, you can see our recommended amounts here!
🦴 Bone Broth: A soothing, hydrating boost that supports digestion, heart and nervous system, detox the liver, support skin and coat and of course it helps with bone and joint health. If all of these healthy reasons weren't enough, bone broth is a super easy way to increase the hydration in our pet's meals. Our dogs and cats need 70% hydration in their diet, dry food diets only provide 10% hydration so anytime we can add hydration to the bowl, we're instantly improving our furry family's health!
🥦 Superfood Veggie Blends: These functional toppers add a burst of antioxidants and nutrients with every meal. Whether you're adding fresh fruits and veggies right from your own kitchen, or you opt for a frozen version to boost the furry guy's nutrition, any pet safe produce we add is beneficial! Our furry guy's health starts in their gut microbiome, every type of produce we can eat also has it's own unique microbiome. The more microbiomes we can introduce to our pet's microbiomes, the more diverse and strong we make the gut. So, your mom was right! Make sure you and your furry guy eat all your veggies!
🍖 Raw Meaty Bones: Essential for dental health, jaw strength, and mental stimulation. Raw Meaty Bones are Mother Nature's toothbrush! Feeding a Raw Meaty Bone for one day can reduce up to 70% of the plaque and tartar on our furry family's teeth and after one week, up to 90%! Oral health can drastically improve just by letting our furry guys do what Mother Nature intended and that's to chew on a bone! Dry fed dogs greatly benefit from about two bones a week, while raw fed dogs are usually good with one bone a week. Regardless of what your furry guy eats, adding a nice Raw Meaty Bone to their diet is an easy way to improve the diet and keep their chompers sparkly white! If you want to listen to all of the amazing benefits Raw Meaty Bones offer, we recorded a Podcast with Dr. Conor Brady! You can listen to it here!
✏️ Tips for Transitioning
👉 Start Small: Introduce one new item to your floof at a time in small quantities. If you decide to start with blueberries for example, only use a couple. If you're going to start with a sardine, make it just one bite of the meal. Goat milk usually suggests 1-2 ounces per 20lbs of pet weight, but you could start with a tablespoon! Make your additions size appropriate. If you have a tiny floof, make your additions super tiny. If your floof is a bigger baby, make the addition a little bigger!
👀 Observe: Watch your floof's reaction and adjust based on their acceptance and digestive comfort. Typically if a furry guy isn't interested in new things, we know right away because they like to pick it out of their food and spit it on the floor. When they decide they do like the idea of new, fresh options in their bowl, we shouldn't see any "bad news" from either end, but in the instance where the new food doesn't agree with them, we should see that fairly quickly. This is another reason why it's important to start slowly and only offer one new item if the furry guy isn't used to variety just yet!
🔑 Balance is Key: Remember, variety over time contributes to a balanced diet but we need to get there first! If you and I ate nothing but chicken and broccoli for the next six months, then sat down to eat a steak on month seven, it would hurt! If your furry family has been eating the same diet for a long period of time, we need to add our variety gradually and in a balanced approach. Slow and steady wins the race!
🤫 Ask Questions: We are always happy to help you tailor the perfect meal plan for your furry family and if you've got questions, we've got answers! Changing your furry guy's diet can be scary if you've never done it before. We get used to their meal time routine and so do they! When we decide fresh food is beneficial for their health and we want to start offering variety, we can have lots of questions and that's where we come in! We are always happy to help you navigate a better meal for your furry family and encourage you to ask us any questions you need to make it an enjoyable experience for both you and your furry guys!
🥩 The Impact of Even a Little Raw
You have heard us say it before, but we're going to say it again! Raw does not have to be an all or nothing approach. Any raw is better than no raw! This is the case, because of what we've already looked at previously, more fresh food and less processed food is always a recipe for optimal health!
Integrating raw foods into your furry family's diet can yield significant benefits, even if it's just a portion of their overall diet. The transition towards more whole, fresh foods can lead to noticeable improvements in your pet's health and well-being. If you're not comfortable serving a fully raw food diet, adding small portions of a complete and balanced raw option is an easy way to improve your pet's health! If you're not sure where to start, we're happy to help you with that!
🐾 A Step Towards Natural Wellness
This Raw Feeding Week, let's embrace the simplicity and profound impact of adding raw and fresh foods to our pets' diets. It's a step towards nurturing their health the natural way, and it's a journey we can take one meal at a time. Whether it's a splash of raw goat milk or a sprinkle of a superfood right from your own kitchen, every little bit contributes to a happier, healthier pet.