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Fish oil is one of the best supplements to add to your dog’s diet. Fish oil supports your canine companion’s heart health, promotes a silky coat, reduces itchy and flaky skin, and can help relieve allergies and joint pain. It can even help strengthen their immune system and could help them fight canine cancer.
That’s because fish oil contains omega-3 fatty acids, an essential “good” type of fat that helps your dog’s body and brain. Like humans, dogs can’t produce omega-3 fatty acids on their own and must get them from their diet. If you’re considering including fish oil as a part of your dog’s nutritional routine, here’s what you need to know.
What Are Fatty Acids Found in Fish Oil?
There are four types of dietary fats: trans fats, saturated fats, monounsaturated fats, and polyunsaturated fats. Omega fatty acids, found in polyunsaturated fats, create important hormones that regulate blood flow and inflammation. However, they aren’t found naturally in the body. Omega-3 is found primarily in cold-water fish, shellfish, plant and nut oils, and flaxseed. But, your dog needs omega-3 in their diet for several reasons.
Omega-3 also helps balance out omega-6 fatty acids, commonly found in processed foods and most grains. Since many dog food manufacturers use meat from corn-fed animals or refined oil (which are high in omega-6), dogs often have an overabundance of omega-6 fatty acids in their diet. Your dog ends up with too much omega-6 and not nearly enough omega-3 fatty acids. And although we need omega-6 fatty acids, our modern diet often has too many. The body needs both in balance, and the same is true for dogs.
How can you make sure your dog or cat is getting lots of Omega-3s?
Because pets need to get most of their Omega-3s from food, it’s crucial to feed cats and dogs foods rich in fatty acids. We create Omega-3-rich pet food and treats like …
What foods to give your dog to add Omega 3s
Fats are the second most important part of your dog’s diet, next to protein. In the wild, nearly half the calories wild dogs eat are from fat. But given the importance of fat in the diet, it’s surprising how so many of us make the same mistake. And this mistake can create dangerous inflammation in your dog.
So let’s take a look at omega-3 fats for dogs, and the other fats you need to balance … and see how critical this delicate balance is to your dog’s health.
There are just three sources of energy or calories for your dog: protein, fat and carbohydrate.
Protein provides calories and also the building blocks for virtually every structure in your dog’s body. They build muscles and soft tissue, skin, hair and nails, blood cells, neurotransmitters and the enzymes that control virtually every action in the body.
Fat also provides energy — and it does much more than just store fat for energy. Fats (or lipids) function as chemical messengers, they form the membranes of all the body’s cells, they help the body absorb fat soluble vitamins (A, D, E and K), and they control hormones and play a huge role in inflammation.
So getting proteins and fats right is critical to your dog’s health — they’re the building blocks for good nutrition. And getting the fats right means not just the amount of fat, but the balance. Let’s take a look …
There are various types of fats in the body, but the dietary fat we refer to most often is called a triglyceride. This fat is made up of a glyceride molecule with three tails of fatty acids attached to it (tri-glyceride). There are two types of triglycerides: saturated and unsaturated.
Saturated fats have straight tails and this means they can pack tightly together. Unsaturated fats have kinks in their tails because some of the carbon bonds in them double up, causing the kinks. Monounsaturated fats have just one kink, but polyunsaturated can have over 20 kinks, or double bonds. The kinks in fatty acids prevent them from packing closely together. So saturated fats are solid at room temperature (like butter or lard) and polyunsaturated fats are usually liquid at room temperature.
Your dog needs both saturated and unsaturated fats. But things tend to go wrong with the polyunsaturated fats and this creates health issues. Let’s take a closer look …
Omega-6 fats include linoleic acid and arachidonic acid. Omega-3 fats include alpha-linolenic acid, eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA).
Both omega-6 and omega-3 fats have the ability to control hormones — and the hormones they control have very different jobs. The omega-6 fatty acids produce hormones that increase inflammation, which is an important part of the immune response. They also help with blood clotting and cell growth. The hormones produced by omega-3 fatty acids also control the immune system and they work alongside the omega-6 fats in an antagonistic manner. So, balance between these fatty acids is an important part of a healthy immune system. Both fats are important and your dog needs both in his diet. But these fats must be reasonably balanced for a balanced immune system … and today’s modern diets make this balance difficult.
Now let’s compare these wild animals to the farmed animals we feed our dogs. Compared to the wild deer and elk, beef contains much lower amounts of both omega-6 and omega-3. And the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fats in grain-fed beef at 7:1 is double the level in the wild game.
And if we look at chicken, we can see that it’s much higher in omega 6 than the deer and beef, but contains less omega-3. And it contains much less omega-3 fat than pheasant. In fact, the 6:3 ratio in chicken is a whopping 28:1.
Remember, omega-6 and omega-3 fats work together in your dog to control inflammation. Omega-6 fats raise inflammation while omega-3 fats lower it. If there’s too much omega-6, the hormones that raise inflammation will be turned on and if there’s too much omega-3, there will be immune dysfunction.
Not all inflammation in the body is a bad thing. If your dog is exposed to viruses or bacteria, inflammation brings white blood cells to the area as an important part of the immune process.
But chronic inflammation – the kind of inflammation that stays for weeks, months and even years – is the cause of most degenerative and inflammatory health issues in your dog, including allergies, arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, heart disease, diabetes, liver or kidney disease and cancer. So the omega fats must be balanced or your dog’s immune system won’t be balanced.
So let’s take a close look at that balance and we’ll start by comparing deer and beef. We used lean ground beef and you can see that the beef only contains a bit more fat overall than the deer meat. But the composition of that fat is very different in the wild deer compared to the domestic cow.
You can see the beef contains double the amount of saturated fat and about half the amount of PUFAs. And if we look at the PUFAs, we can see that the beef contains much less omega-6 than the deer and a higher ratio of omega-6 to omega-3. And when the 6:3 ratio is unbalanced, it can cause chronic inflammation.
Compared to the pheasant, the domestic chicken contains much more fat overall and it contains a much higher percentage of PUFAs. And if you compare the amount of omega-6 to omega-3, there’s four times more omega-6! So once again, your dog will be eating food that’s too high in omega-6 fats. This will create chronic inflammation and, sooner or later, it will cause the chronic health issues that go with it.
There are definitely differences between the animals we eat today and the animals our ancestors ate centuries ago. But by a landslide, the biggest difference is the foods we feed them.
In the wild, ruminants would eat grasses (ruminants are animals with a rumen, like cattle, deer, goats and sheep). But most ruminants today, even grass-fed ones, spend their last days eating grain, soy and corn. They would eat very little of this in the wild, but they’re fed huge amounts before they’re slaughtered, to make their meat fattier and tastier (at least to humans).
This is a comparison of the omega-6 and omega-3 levels in grasses and grains. You can see that grass and alfalfa contain more omega-3 than omega-6 … but the corn and soy our food animals eat contains much more inflammatory omega-6 fats and only a fraction of the omega-3 fats.
When cows, chickens, pigs and other food animals are forced to eat these foods, it changes their fats. And ultimately, it will change the fats in your dog when he eats them. Those deficiencies are passed right up through the food chain. And this is especially ironic if you’re feeding a raw diet … because your dog will suffer the same health issues from eating grain-fed animals as he would if he ate the grains himself!
Now if you’re getting a little depressed about this, don’t! I’ll show you how you can fix the fats in your dog’s food. But before I do, let’s take a quick moment to talk about dogs eating commercial foods.
The Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO) provides nutritional standards (called model bills and regulations) that pet food manufacturers must abide by if they want to advertise their food as “complete and balanced.”
Pet foods don’t just contain animals with unbalanced fats … they contain grains and foods that also include unbalanced fats. This is mostly to keep costs down — and the folks at AAFCO seem to be fine with this … because they don’t care unless the omega-6 to omega-3 ratio exceeds a whopping 30:1. If that doesn’t alarm you, I’ll put it in perspective: if you fed your dog nothing but chicken skin, the 6:3 ratio would actually be healthier than AAFCO requirements because chicken skin has a ratio of 24:1.
So if you feed our dog a commercial dog food, it will likely be too high in pro-inflammatory omega-6 fats. And if you feed your dog raw meats that aren’t raised 100% on pasture, they’ll be too high in pro-inflammatory omega-6 fats. And this puts him at risk for nearly every chronic disease.
Fortunately, you can do a little tweaking to your dog’s diet … and it’s actually quite easy! Let’s start with beef (and you can follow the same rules for lamb and goat).
Compared to deer and other wild ruminants, beef, lamb and goat meat are high in saturated fat, low in PUFAs and low in omega-3 fats.
Compared to game poultry, chicken is lower in saturated fat, a bit higher in PUFAs but, like beef, much lower in omega-3 fats.
So let’s talk about how we can balance the fats to keep inflammation down. And there are a few foods we can add to balance the fats. Let’s take a quick look at these foods.