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If you’re preparing nutritious meals for yourself, you might wonder whether it’s worth doing the same for your dog. While cooking fresh ingredients gives you a sense of control over what your pet eats, it isn’t always the best or healthiest option.
Many online recipes don’t provide your dog with a complete and balanced diet, which can lead to nutritional deficiencies. Learn more about the pros and cons of making your dog’s dinner from scratch and why it’s important to use veterinary nutritionist-approved homemade dog food recipes to combine your enthusiasm with the right expertise.
Benefits of Cooking for Your Dog
While few pets require a homemade diet, cooking for your dog can offer several advantages—provided you pick the right professional-approved recipes.
A Sense of Connection
Home cooking for your dog can provide rewarding reassurance and strengthen the human-animal bond.
“It’s very fulfilling to love and care for our pets through nutrition,” Julie Churchill, DVM, PhD, DACVIM (Nutrition), board-certified veterinary nutritionist and Professor of Veterinary Nutrition at the University of Minnesota, says. “It can give you a sense of control when other things feel out of your control.” This can be particularly meaningful if you’re managing an illness or during the final stages of your dog’s life.
Control Over Ingredients
Homemade diets let you choose the exact ingredients for your dog’s bowl. Plus, they help you to pick for palatability, avoid artificial preservatives, or select sustainable, ethically sourced ingredients.
Medical Management
Valerie J. Parker, DVM, DACVIM (SAIM, Nutrition), is a board-certified veterinary nutritionist and professor in Veterinary Clinical Sciences at the Ohio State University. She explains that sometimes your dog may respond better to a home-prepared diet if they have a particular medical condition. Examples include if your dog has food allergies or protein-losing enteropathy (PLE), which requires an “ultra-low” fat diet.
Additionally, if your dog has multiple health issues, there may not be a commercial therapeutic diet that meets all their needs. “In these circumstances, I strongly feel a board-certified veterinary nutritionist who understands nutrition and the disease should prescribe this,” Dr. Churchill says.
Hydration
Homemade meals naturally contain more moisture than kibble. According to Dr. Churchill, this is particularly beneficial for dogs with urinary tract disease or seniors whose thirst declines with age.
Weight Management
Moist homemade meals also have a bigger volume than dry kibble. Feeding your dog a homemade diet may aid weight management by helping them feel full. However, Dr Churchill cautions that selecting high-fat protein sources could negate this benefit.
Drawbacks of Home-Prepared Dog Food
Homemade diets can carry significant health risks for your dog if not carefully formulated and followed.
Difficult to Get the Right Nutritional Balance
Both Dr. Churchill and Dr. Parker say the biggest challenge is ensuring meals are complete and balanced. When feeding your dog a homemade diet, it can be hard to provide the nearly 40 essential nutrients that they need daily.
Research from the University of California, Davis, found that 95% of 200 analyzed home-cooked dog food recipes lacked at least one essential nutrient, and 84% lacked multiple. Only 10 recipes met the minimum standards for essential nutrients, with most of these written by veterinarians.
If you get it wrong, your dog can develop nutritional deficiencies, leading to problems including poor coat quality, bone fractures, immune system dysfunction, gastrointestinal issues, or life-threatening liver or kidney disease. This is all the more worrying because it can take months or years for dogs to show signs of these deficiencies, by which time the damage may be irreversible.
Resources
Purchasing and properly preparing, portioning, and storing homemade meals takes time, money, and effort. Home cooking is rarely cheaper than feeding your dog commercial pet food.
Batch cooking for large dogs can be difficult, even with a large chest freezer. Regular consultations with a board-certified veterinary nutritionist, which are often necessary for dogs with medical issues, add to the cost.
Risk of Detrimental Diet Drift
Even with a balanced recipe from a board-certified nutritionist, malnutrition can occur if you make seemingly small changes. In one study, fewer than 15% of owners stick to their original home-cooked diet plan after a year.
“Americans don’t like to use gram scales,” Dr. Churchill observes. “They like to eyeball things, and it’s so easy to upset the balance.”
Swapping out ingredients, missing essential supplements, or altering cooking methods are common problems with real consequences.
Not Suitable for Puppies
Homemade diets are risky for growing puppies, and Dr. Churchill doesn’t recommend using them during this stage. “That is the most nutritionally fragile time of life,” she says. “Their needs are high and ever-changing, and it’s super tricky to continually modify a recipe to meet those needs.”
If precise nutrient ratios—particularly for calcium and phosphorus—aren’t met, lifelong skeletal and developmental issues are possible.
Hygiene and Food Safety Risks
Feeding raw or undercooked ingredients or storing food improperly increases the risk of exposure to foodborne pathogens. Bacteria such as Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria can infect both pets and people in the household.
Building a Balanced Dog Bowl
The breakdown of a balanced homemade diet varies widely depending on your dog’s breed type, age, health, and lifestyle. However, understanding the essential components of dog food can help when consulting a veterinary nutritionist.
Protein
“Dogs are carnivorous omnivores, so they need roughly twice the amount of protein that humans need to meet all their essential amino acid needs,” Dr. Churchill explains. “I would strongly advise it to be an animal-based protein source.” Common options include chicken, beef, turkey, eggs, and dairy. These provide the vital building blocks for muscles, energy, and immune health.
Vegetarian diets require even more careful formulation with support from a veterinary nutritionist.
Carbohydrates
Carbohydrates may not be essential for dogs (except during pregnancy and lactation), but they can be an excellent source of dietary energy, fiber, and vitamins.
“They aren’t just fillers, as some people refer to them,” Dr. Churchill says. Whole grains like rice, oats, and quinoa, plus fruits and vegetables, such as pumpkin, carrots, and leafy greens, are examples of beneficial sources.
Oils and Fats
Dogs require the right kinds of fatty acids to maintain healthy skin, coat, and immune system. “The richest sources of linoleic acid, an omega-6 essential fatty acid, are typically sourced from plant-based oils like corn, canola, safflower,” Dr. Churchill says. She explains that omega-3 fatty acids from cold-water fish oils are a helpful addition.
Dr. Churchill often sees owners making their own oil modifications, which can create deficiencies. “They pick things they think are healthy for us, like olive, avocado, or coconut oil, but it doesn’t fulfill the needs for dogs and cats,” she says.
Vitamins and Minerals
Many home-prepared diets for dogs fall short when it comes to getting the right ratio and range of vitamins and minerals, including calcium, phosphorus, zinc, iodine, and selenium. “If we muck up that ratio, serious things can happen,” Dr. Churchill says. “From nutritional secondary hyperparathyroidism [high blood calcium levels], to terrible orthopedic problems and bone fractures.”
Generic dog supplements are often insufficient, and human multivitamins may contain ingredients toxic to dogs. Be sure to consult your dog’s veterinarian to see which veterinary-formulated supplements or nutritionist-approved combinations they recommend.
The Importance of Consulting With the Experts
Both Dr. Churchill and Dr. Parker recommend consulting a board-certified veterinary nutritionist to develop a tailored, appropriate homemade diet for your dog.
“In the old days, we rarely saw nutritional problems when the bulk of our dog population was eating a high-quality commercial diet,” Dr. Churchill says. “In this last year, I think we are up to our fifth case of nutritional problems as a result of homemade diets.”
“It has been demonstrated that most recipes people will find online or in books do not provide complete and balanced nutrition,” Dr. Parker adds. “An exception is where people can get complete and balanced home-cooked diet recipes from companies that employ full-time veterinary nutritionists (e.g., Balance It, JustFoodForDogs, The Farmer’s Dog).”
Once you have a balanced recipe, follow it precisely. That means not deviating from the prescribed ingredients, quantities, preparation, supplement instructions, and storage methods. If you have any concerns about your dog’s health, weight, or energy levels, reach out to your veterinary nutritionist.