3 Things to Know Before Giving Your Pet a Multi-Vitamin Supplement

Health-conscious humans are now reevaluating their decision to take multi-vitamin supplements themselves, as well as whether to give them to their pets. Recently, a team of French researchers tracked 8,112 volunteers who took either a placebo or a multi-vitamin for over six years and found no evidence multi-vitamin supplements help prevent major health events like heart disease or cancer. Other recent studies have even indicated that vitamin supplements may increase the risk of certain cancers.¹ Similarly, many of the recent pet food recalls have been due to potential adverse consequences of excess man-made vitamins or minerals that are routinely added to most pet foods. Here are three things that will help you determine if you should give your dog or cat a multi-vitamin supplement.

Do I Need to Add Supplements to a High-quality Pet Food?

More and more pet parents are migrating to more natural and biologically-appropriate pet foods for their dogs and cats. This is resulting in greater health and longer lives for their companion animals. It also raises the question of whether adding a supplement to these premium foods is really necessary. The answer to that depends upon what type of food you are feeding and what it contains, since natural, premium pet foods vary considerably in type and content. Determining if you need to add a supplement to your premium pet food depends upon if you feed raw, canned, or dry food, and whether or not you have a pet with a condition requiring extra nutritional support.  

Are Limited-Ingredient Pet Foods Really Necessary?

A new trend in pet food is emerging with the proliferation of limited-ingredient pet foods on the market. These foods are being marketed to pet owners with dogs or cats that have exhibited sensitivities to specific foods in their diets. While a few pets truly do have allergies to many foods and might benefit from a limited-ingredient diet, the majority of dogs and cats will thrive on high-quality foods that contain a variety of healthy nutrient sources, but that don’t contain the ingredients known to be common allergens for pets.

More Pet Food Ingredients = More Natural Nutrients

Eating a healthy diet with a variety of foods is not just good for humans; it’s good for our pets, too. In the wild, animals eat their entire prey. Natural carnivores eat the meat, but also the bones and intestines, including the grains and vegetation previously consumed by the prey.

2012 List of Best Pet Foods Names Nature's Logic

On December 1, 2011 Susan Thixon, the pet food advocate behind the website TruthaboutPetFood.com, published The List of Best Pet Foods and Nature’s Logic made the list! Based upon her own extensive research, Thixon used several criteria for selecting the 10 commercial pet foods she would feel comfortable feeding her own pets: Quality of Ingredients, Transparency/Customer Service, Integrity, and additional factors she knows from years of reporting on the pet food industry. No companies on the list paid to appear on this list or sponsored Thixon or her advocacy efforts in any way. Companies only learned of their inclusion on the list days before it was published.