Mary Allen
Many people cut down on carbohydrates and feel good about it. But what about dogs? Do they need any carbs at all? Opinions differ and we try to sort out the concepts.
Most dogs prefer meat to other foods if they are allowed to choose. If you look at their teeth, it is also quite obvious that they are designed to eat mainly meat and gnaw on bones. In other words, protein-rich and low-carbohydrate foods should be the most natural thing for dogs to eat.
At the same time, through the millennia, the dog has evolved alongside humans and become something of an omnivore. A dog can digest and absorb nutrients from both protein and fat as well as from carbohydrates. But: The dog must have protein and fat to feel good. On the other hand, it can do without carbohydrates, even though they can be a good source of energy in reasonable amounts.
So: The problem is not the carbohydrates themselves. It is when the dog gets too many carbohydrates that they can become harmful and lead to sadness such as diarrhea, obesity, and poorer nutrient uptake.
If you take a closer look at many of today’s dry foods, they contain a large proportion of carbohydrates. Strange, one might think because dogs apparently should only eat smaller amounts of that particular nutrient. But the explanation is simple: Carbohydrate-rich ingredients, such as corn, rice, potatoes, and bran, are cheap and easy to obtain. In addition, they help give dry food its structure and help it to be stored for a long time without getting bad.
Many dog owners find that their dogs feel great about dry food where grain or some other carbohydrate-rich ingredient is first in the table of contents. And if so, there may not be much reason to switch to another food, if you are not curious about whether your dog can feel even better from another type of diet, of course.
The content of diet food for dogs varies greatly. However, if your dog needs to lose a few pounds, be sure to opt for a diet high in protein. A study published in the American scientific journal Journal of Nutrition shows that overweight dogs that receive an extra protein-rich diet lose about as much weight as dogs that eat a more traditional diet high in fiber. An important difference, however, is that the dogs that ate a high-protein diet lost less muscle mass. And you want the dog to keep it.
A small amount of fiber in the food can be good. They can help with constipation and make dogs with diabetes have less dramatic blood sugar fluctuations. However, if it becomes too much, the fibers can impair the absorption of important nutrients and give a gassy and loose stomach.
When researchers examined how a carbohydrate-free diet with about three-quarters of the calories from fat and a quarter from protein affected pregnant beagles and their puppies, the results were disappointing. Those bitches gave birth to fewer puppies that survived than bitches that were fed carbohydrates. But in a later study where pregnant beagle and labrador bitches received a carbohydrate-free diet with higher protein content, the results were not the same. Those dogs did as well as carbohydrate-eating dogs in a control group.
From these research results, one can of course draw slightly different conclusions. There is no exact formula for what the perfect dog food looks like. Just as we humans feel good about different kinds of diets, so do dogs. But if your dog poops loose and is gassy in the stomach, has dull fur and dry skin, or finds it difficult to hold the weight even though it does not get anything “extra”, take a look at the contents of the feed package. It may be worth trying something else. A tip is to gradually get the dog used to the new food, otherwise, it may have problems with the stomach.