Grains for Your Dog Food

Krista Heinz: Hi! My name is Krista Heinz and I am the owner of Doggie Style Bakery Boutique and Pet Spa in Dupont Circle; and we are here today discussing how to make your own dog food. Right now, we are going to go ahead and discuss the grains that we are going to use in your dog food. There is a lot of different grains that you can choose from in making dog's food. Today, we are actually going to use Quaker oats or oatmeal, but some other options for you are wholegrain brown rice. I have some Basmati rice here. You could also use barley. There are lots of grains out there that you can use, but you want to make sure what you do is that you use whole grains. I like oatmeal personally because it cooks really quickly and it's really high in fiber. It's also one of the super foods that are now being touted by nutritional experts. So it's a really good option for your dog's food. We are going to add whatever you decide to add. You can always decide to add a variety of grains to your dog's food also; but whatever you add, we are going to add about 2 cups into your dog's food. So we will just take that, open it up and just scoop it out. Well, add this in with lots of water when we cook the food; so it will turn into sort of a stew. So that's about it really for grains. If you want you can actually eliminate the grains out of your dog's diet. We can add some more fruits and vegetables into the dog's diet. If you use the grains, you want to use about 30% of your dog's food as grains; but the other option is to remove them from the diet. There is an argument out there. There are lots of people that feed a raw food diet to their dog and a raw food diet would never include grains because grains have to be cooked. The idea behind that is the dogs really can't cook in the wild. So therefore the grains aren't that valuable to them. There are definitely some nutritional values to grains. There is definitely lot of fiber in the grains, which is very good for your dog's diet, especially older dogs. If you have got a younger dog or dog that's ill, you may want to remove the grains from the diet and add in more meats and vegetables, mostly vegetables, you want to lean towards. The meat shouldn't be any more that 30% of their diet. So if you want to substitute your grains, make sure you substitute them with the vegetables. So that's about it. The next up we are going to talk about are the meats that you are going to add to your dog's diet.