The basics of the egg and sweet potato home cooked diet for dogs.

The Easiest Home Cooking For Dogs

On my website I have quite a few different ways to cook for your dog but I want you to know The easiest home cooking for dogs. Alternative for Raw diets of six or seven kinds, some diets that are rich in carbohydrates from 10 years ago, to some diets that are more conservative on carbohydrates trending now. My favorite is something that’s easy to make, can be prepared beforehand, doesn’t involve blood or bone. And meets practically ALL of a dog’s nutritional requirements. More or less.

To the basic “diet” below, there would also be a pinch of shaved almonds, a ground up egg shell or a couple Tums, a Flintstone multivitamin (Flintstones Complete) and if you wanted a good probiotic: A little handful of your garden soil as long as it was dark, and successfully had earth worms in it. (Not in what you actually feed, but it speaks to the fact that the dirt is organically / biologically active, moist and safe enough to support earthworms.)  Things to exclude from the diet would be vegetables with starch and carbs like potato, peas, limas and beans. Let the sweet potato supply the carbs along with the soluble fiber. Rice: notsomuch.

The basics of the egg and sweet potato home cooked diet for dogs.
Easiest home made diet for dogs

Home Cooking For Dogs Download: 2019_home_cooking_for_dogs_best_all_around_recipe

Somewhere in between feeding raw meat with enzymes and other special ingredients, all the way across the board to “just plain chicken and rice”, here is a nice “middle of the road“ diet that is suitable for most if not all dogs.

It brings to bear a conservative carbohydrate content, and it is extremely low in fat. If you look at each of the ingredients, they’re absolutely essential to the dogs nutrition and prevailing health.

Here are the ingredients:

Eggs prepared in any fashion although boiling a bunch of eggs on the weekend to have enough for the week is certainly efficient, not to mention the fact that you can buy boiled eggs by the dozen already shelled in the package.

Low carbohydrate, “stirfry“ vegetables. I found these at Target in steamer packs, they contain cauliflower, broccoli, snow peas, and other non-starchy vegetables. You just throw that in the microwave and steam it, chop it up a little and then mix it with the chopped eggs and you’re ready to go.

Pumpkin.

One of the things that would be missing in a diet based on non-starchy vegetables and eggs would be soluble fiber, so you need to add pumpkin to the diet. Sweet potato is almost as good. Adding a powdered soluble fiber is also effective and may be easier? That would be fructo-oligosaccharides from Amazon.com made from chicory root or Jerusalem artichoke.

The amount of pumpkin that you would add would be 1 tablespoon per 10 pounds in each feeding. After you had been feeding for a while you would kind of get the idea of what it looked like when it was made correctly and you would not have to measure painstakingly so much.

Home Cooking For Dogs
Home Cooking For Dogs

A diet that is based on eggs, low starch vegetables and a little bit of soluble fiber from pumpkin, is lacking in calcium and perhaps even some antioxidants. This is added by putting some blueberry yogurt of high-quality into the diet. Something like a teaspoon for 10 pounds would be appropriate, stir that in to the meal and you’re good

When I was researching raw diets, I noticed that some people were giving straight up, raw egg shell and it turns out that digestibility is actually OK, and this is not a bad way to get calcium into a dog. So, if you are using eggs in the diet and you feel like it, you could actually use a raw egg shell and all.

For most dogs over 20 pounds a half an egg shell is more than enough calcium for the day. Obviously that would be down tuned for a Chihuahua at 3 pounds LOL

Are eggs a complete protein? To be honest I couldn’t tell you, except that eggs are extremely “kidney friendly“ and used in diets that are intended to spare kidney function in older animals. The other proteins of a similar type (it’s also an albumin) comes from whey or milk protein. For that reason I suggest that if you want to supplement protein, instead of adding a bulky protein like chicken, consider perhaps a spoonful of basic whey protein powder. If you are using eggs, that should not be necessary but, if you feel like it, go ahead.

In the above diet we have considered protein, fat, fiber, carotenoids, calcium, even some advantages as far as antioxidants but we need to take it one step further: Iron and vitamins. Just in case were missing something, we should add a multivitamin to the diet and I have always been partial to Flintstones complete because it contains iron which is lacking in all of the above ingredients;  from eggs to vegetables to yogurt.

So a Flintstones Complete, multivitamin dosed at a rate of 1/2 tablet for 30 pounds and under, and for 30 pounds and over we get a whole tablet per day. 60 to 70 pounds and over with yet a tablet and a half or more. Vitamins are quite safe for dogs, just make sure that the vitamin is not made with xylitol please check the label before administering it, because formulation sometimes change.

To recap, we are talking about a home-cooked diet that is simple, and nutritionally complete that is based on boiled eggs, starch free low carbohydrate mixed vegetables from a steamer, some blueberry yogurt, and pumpkin as well as A multivitamin for iron and to correct any small deficiencies.

Optional added items could include a whey-based protein powder.

Regarding the consistency of the diet, there are some dogs that will carefully pick out the egg and leave the vegetables, if that’s the case you are going to have to dice everything up and mix it together in such a style that dogs cannot pick out the vegetables,

Some dogs wolf it down en masse, in which case you are lucky.

How much to feed?

The vegetables are unlimited and you know how to dose the pumpkin and yogurt.

So it comes to the eggs.

1 egg per 15 pounds twice a day.

A 60 pound dog would get 8 eggs a day.

Still cheaper than boutique pet foods!

You can vary that by age and weight.

Older, heavier dogs get less eggs

Younger leaner dogs are welcome to more.

Home Cooking For Dogs

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Dr Erik Johnson is a Marietta, Georgia Veterinarian with a practice in small animal medicine. He graduated from University of Georgia with his Doctorate in 1991. Dr Johnson is the author of several texts on Koi and Pond Fish Health and Disease as well as numerous articles on dog and cat health topics.