Do raw fed dogs need probiotics? What to Know

You take probiotics, but does your dog need probiotics too?

While pretty disgusting on the surface to most of us, there is an entire world that we are just starting to learn about that may change the entire face of nutrition as we know it. Without getting too far into the weeds here, we will be taking a look at good bacteria, bad bacteria, the microbiome, prebiotics, dysbiosis (bacterial in-balance), and probiotics in this section.

Why You Should Feed Your Dog Probiotics

Feeding your dog “good” or beneficial bacteria (also known as probiotics) can have the following positive impacts:

Probiotics are little chemical factories that protect yourdog’s body from bad bacteria, viruses, and fungi.

Probiotics serve as an important barrier to cancer-causing toxins, drugs, heavy metals, and allergens.

They produce important B vitamins.

They assist the body in absorbing nutrients like calcium, magnesium, and iron.

Probiotics drive proper digestion and absorption of nutrients.

They slow the growth of harmful bacteria like salmonella and E. Coli.

Garlic Give up to 1 tsp of raw, organic, US grown garlic per 30 lbs of your dog’s body weight per day. You might have heard that garlic is toxic for dogs – but the devil is in the dose! As long as you don’t feed your dog heads full of it, garlic is safe and healthy for your dog.

You’ve just wasted your probiotics … and the money you used to buy them. But don’t worry … read on and you’ll learn how to feed the fish and make sure your dog gets the health-boosting benefits of probiotics!

Probiotics can be an important addition to your dog’s diet, especially if he’s ever had antibiotics or drugs, if he’s ever eaten cooked or processed food or if he suffers from allergies, digestive upset or many other common immune-related health issues. You can easily bolster his health with easy-to-use probiotics … and now you know how to protect that investment by adding prebiotics too!

Let’s say you go to the pet store and buy a goldfish and a bowl. If you brought the goldfish home, put his bowl in the windowsill and just left him there for a couple of weeks, he’d die, right? Now leave him in the bowl for another week or two and you’ll end up with a bowl full of one dead fish plus a bunch of algae and green weedy stuff.

Do you give your dog probiotics? That could be a really good idea. But you could also be wasting your money. Think about this …

Raw feeding; benefits of probiotic. Do dogs need probiotic. Water kefir and milk kefir for dogs

Hippocrates, a Greek physician of the Age of Pericles, considered the founding father of modern medicine and the reason doctors take the Hippocratic oath in college, said all disease begins in the gut, that we were to let food be our medicine. We’re only now really coming back around to that simple statement. The amazing vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals in food aside, what Hippocrates could not have known was the crucial role that life living inside our gut tract played in the process. Termed the gut flora, we now know that these little guys play a pivotal role in our physical and mental well being, that keeping them happy is of the utmost importance. It’s undoubtedly the same for dogs but after that things get a little grey. So here’s everything we know about canine probiotics, beginning, as I so often do, with what we know of the gut flora in humans.