Health and Longevity Course for Dogs Chapter 6
If you are like most dog lovers, you are looking for ways to keep your canine friend healthy and happy for many years to come. This article will answer questions many people ask such as:
- Is it important to give my dogs vitamins?
- If I'm already giving minerals or other supplements, is it necessary to give my dog vitamins?
- How do I know which supplements are good and which ones aren't?
In Chapter 5 of Health and Longevity Course for Dogs, I emphasize that providing your dog with all the building blocks is crucial to her/his good health.
If you didn't get a chance to read Chapter 5, you can click here and read the article to catch up. You shouldn't miss it if you want to create a healthy and long life for your canine friend.
Vita means life
When it comes to vitamins, their name suggests they are life-giving substances because vita is life in Latin.
Most people understand vitamins are essential to health, but many are not aware that almost all vitamins sold in pharmacies, drug stores and veterinary clinics are made of synthetic materials. There are also some dog lovers who believe that all the necessary vitamins are supplied if they feed either wholesome raw or cooked food or vitamin-supplemented kibble, but is that true?
Many years back, I often reached for a bottle of regular multivitamins with the best intention of helping my canine patients, but then I started studying the topic of vitamin production and their effects on the body. I ran into a number of references from traditional Chinese medicine that claimed that conventional vitamins create a state of excess.
It made sense to me because I sometimes saw such symptoms in my practice. Some dogs become nauseous when multivitamins were given on an empty stomach and others started to pant at night and overheat.
Synthetic vitamins are not alive
Logically synthetic vitamins can't be the same because they are made of synthetic ingredients. Ideally, they should be food based, but we can't make real food from chemicals and the same applies to vitamins. I compare synthetic vitamins to plastic apples. They look pretty, but they are not the same as real apples.
What I was seeing made me look for a better solution. I knew vitamins are necessary to achieve optimal health, longevity and disease prevention. I was also aware that declining soil and food quality and food transportation were the cause of lower levels of natural vitamins in food. But I also intuitively felt that conventional multivitamin formulas for dogs didn't do the job.
When I look for a solution in medicine, I often look at nature for inspiration.
In nature, vitamins come bound in live or fresh whole food. They are much more complex than, let's say vitamin C, ascorbic acid. Unfortunately, our civilization brought unexpected interruptions to the natural nutrient cycle.
For example, oranges grown in California end up on the table in Wyoming. In the best case scenario, they will end up in a Wyoming compost and in the worst case scenario, the local landfill. This is the key reason why even the best organic food is increasingly deficient in minerals and vitamins.
In nature soil would be replenished locally in a simple cycle - local soil > plants > animals > local soil
The modern civilization cycle looks like this: soil > plants > animals > landfill or a distant compost pile
Perhaps you are asking, ‘why don't farmers replenish nutrients back to the soil?’ The problem is that the process would be too expensive. Conventional agriculture uses imbalanced and incomplete fertilizers that mainly focus on supplementing nitrates, phosphates, calcium and potassium, which makes plants grow, but they are definitely not the same.
It's true that composting is becoming more common in some parts of the world, but the nutrients in most leftover food are still lost in landfills and the oceans instead of being returned back to the soil and only a fraction of the compost returns to the place of origin to complete the natural nutrient cycle.
This is a huge and very difficult problem to solve.
Why even producing your own food is not perfect
Perhaps you are lucky to have a farm and feed your dog what the farm has to offer. But even if you produce food on your farm, your best friend may not be getting all the needed nutrients. The soil in different regions varies. In nature, animals roam from place to place and intuitively find what their bodies need. In the current model of property ownership, access to diverse soils with different nutrients and mineral content is limited and nature's design is not compatible with such restrictions.
Once you understand the problem of soil depletion and the problems that synthetic vitamins bring, it becomes clear that the only way to maintain your dog's optimal health is by supplementing with natural vitamins.
A serious obstacle to naturally-sourced vitamins
Based on what we know, supplementing your dog's diet with naturally-sourced vitamins would make the most sense but, "Houston, we have a problem..."
For example, if you wanted to make vitamin C from oranges, each orange contains about 50mg of vitamin C. That means that making one 1,000 mg capsule would require 20 organic oranges, or approximately seven pounds of organic oranges.
Let's do the math
The price of organic oranges is somewhere around $2/lb, or $14 for 7lbs.
When you add the cost of manufacturing, capsulation, packaging, transportation and distribution, the estimated retail price of ONE vitamin C capsule is $20! That means a 30 capsule bottle of naturally-extracted vitamin C would cost about $600 per bottle!
Plus, there are other vitamins your dog needs so that would make a single bottle of your dog's multivitamin cost thousands of dollars!
Another problem with natural extracts
Even if natural vitamin extracts were affordable, they would not be as good as vitamins bound in whole food. Extracting the vitamin C from an orange removes it from its natural food carrier - the pulp and the rest of the orange.
There is a difference between eating an orange or an apple and drinking orange or apple juice. Eating the whole fruit is what nature intended. The fruit is balanced and complete. However, when a piece of fruit is juiced, it loses the important balancing components, such as the pulp, fiber and skin in the case of apples.
Juices are high in sugar and will make an average person gain weight if drank on a regular basis.
A solution to the vitamin quandary
Here is a summary what you have learned so far:
- Soil depletion has resulted in nutrient deficient food
- The nutrient cycle in nature is broken
- Vitamins are vital for good health
- Most vitamins on the market are synthetic
- Synthetic vitamins are 'the plastic apples' of the vitamin industry that cause stomach upsets and imbalances
- The body has evolved to process and regulate whole-food based vitamins, not extracts
- The cost of natural vitamin extract is too high for practical production
For many years I felt frustrated and challenged by this situation.
It took me several years of studying and searching for the right technology to find a patented vitamin manufacturing process.
In this process, vitamins are cultured on probiotic media and incorporated in the bio-protein of the probiotic mass. The body understands how to process whole food vitamins and that is why naturally-cultured vitamins DO NOT cause stomach upsets and overheating, unlike their synthetic counterparts. The body knows how to process food-based nutrients and vitamins.
When I worked on the SoulFood formula, I added some other important ingredients, in addition to naturally-grown vitamins, to prevent the most common medical problems that dogs suffer from. I added certified organic asparagus to protect the kidneys, organic dandelion root to support the liver and organic turmeric to reduce inflammation and prevent cancer.
I am writing this article because I can't stop being excited about the changes others are seeing in their dogs and the testimonials they write.
Why am I telling you this?
Sharing good things in life feels right. Artists, nurses, scientists, farmers or engineers – every profession shares something.
Not sharing what I've learned about vitamins and nutrition would feel completely wrong. Wouldn't you share a delicious chocolate bar or an experience with your friend?
If you want to read about the changes in dogs after they start getting SoulFood, you can click here.
Did you know this is only one article from our free Holistic Health & Longevity Course? Check out the entire course...
To read the entire Holistic Health and Longevity Course for Dogs click on the links below.
© Dr. Peter Dobias, DVM
