What's A Good Raw Food? Featuring Jordan & Kai

We here at Viva Pets take the responsibility of choosing a healthy diet for your dog or cat seriously. And if you're reading this, you're likely of the same mindset!

Our pets cannot read the labels and make informed decisions for themselves, so it's up to us to make the best choices we can on their behalf. So how do you identify a good frozen raw food?

Ingredients are a great place to start. 

Whether you're feeding a frozen/freeze-dried raw diet, a dry kibble, or anything in between, a high meat content is extremely important. A well-balanced raw food should have about 5% liver and another 5-10% other organs (think heart, kidneys, lung, spleen, and pancreas). Ground bone content should be around 10% of the meal, or supplemented with eggshell, calcium carbonate, or citrate if using a bone-free diet.

A well-balanced raw diet should have about 10-15% fruits and vegetables for dogs, but only about 2-3% for cats. Some of the best you will see might include blueberries, cranberries, apples, broccoli, kale, leafy greens, and kelp. These inclusions will add a variety of fibre to the diet (which helps to move food through the GI tract, in addition to acting as prebiotics that feed the probiotics in their gut). Fruits and vegetables will also offer important vitamins and minerals that will round out the nutrient profile of the main meat protein.

Lastly, to really be considered a balanced diet, try to include a steady supply of omega fatty acids from either fish diets or toppers (think salmon, sardines, or mackerel), or add fish oil added to the meal (salmon, pollock or algae oil).