When was the last time you fed your dog or cat vegetables – real, organic vegetables?
If you’re like most pet parents, you probably don’t do it very often. Most dogs and cats don’t receive vegetables on a regular basis, unless you feed your pet a homemade, species-specific diet made with organic produce.
Some commercially processed pet foods claim to include vegetables and other green foods, but the harsh high-heat processing used to produce the food often zeros out the nutritional value.
While your pet doesn’t require much – vegetables should make up a very small percentage of your dog’s or cat’s diet – they’re actually very important for health.
Both dogs and cats need vegetables for essential nutrients and fiber that they don’t typically get from their usual diet.
Species-appropriate dog and cat food is predominantly protein. While high-quality meat sources supply amino acids and other valuable nutrients, they don’t contain the important antioxidants and phytonutrients found only in plant foods.
Vegetables are the only source of antioxidants and phytonutrients in your pet’s diet. So, unless you’re regularly feeding vegetables to your cat or dog, your pet is not getting the health-supporting polyphenols and other antioxidants he needs for optimal health.
My favorite way to provide dogs and cats with the vitamins and minerals they need is by feeding them whole foods. With whole food sources, you don’t need to worry if you’re feeding too much of one nutrient and not enough of another. Whole foods provide consistent balanced nutrition.
If you’re looking for ways to make sure your pet gets the best nutrition possible, I recommend adding fresh vegetables to your pet’s homemade diet. Or as an alternative, you can provide her with the benefits of whole foods by adding a topper containing vegetables to her usual meals.
How Cats and Dogs Benefit From Plant Foods
Even though cats and dogs are carnivores, they benefit from eating small amounts of plant foods.
There are a number of important reasons to include vegetables in your pet’s diet:
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Cats and dogs need fiber for their digestive health.
Just the same as with humans, fiber doesn’t provide any nutrients or energy to your cat or dog. But it is essential for maintaining a healthy digestive system.
Fiber plays a key role in supporting the healthy bacteria in your pet’s gut. This helps optimize her digestion process. If your pet tends to have sluggish digestion, it will help speed things up. And if she tends to have loose stools, it will help slow things down.
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Plant foods help balance the alkalinity and acidity of your pet’s food.
Most vegetables have an alkalizing effect on the body. Meat and other proteins make the body more acidic.
Your pet’s organs, including his liver, pancreas, gallbladder, heart and kidneys, function optimally in a more alkaline environment. Certain plant foods can provide an alkalizing effect and help balance the acidity from proteins.
Moderate to strong alkaline-forming foods include grasses, seaweed, broccoli, kale, beets and carrots.
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Vegetables provide a wide range of vitamins and minerals, including vitamins A and K2, vitamin C co-factors, iron, folate, calcium, potassium and magnesium.
Vitamins and minerals provide foundational support for all the cellular processes in your pet’s body. Vegetables are storehouses of vitamins and minerals, so adding even small amounts to his diet can provide a huge boost to his health and energy.
Root vegetables like carrots and beets grow deep in the soil and absorb minerals from the ground. Seaweed absorbs minerals and micronutrients from the ocean. And all vegetables contain a wide array of vitamins and minerals, such as vitamins A and K2, iron and folate, that can be lacking in processed pet foods.
It’s important to choose Certified Organic vegetables so you don’t feed your pet health-damaging synthetic fertilizers, glyphosate and GMOs.
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Only plant foods provide phytonutrients and antioxidants.
Meat provides important amino acids, which give your pet the building blocks she needs for making proteins and producing hormones and neurotransmitters. However, to get antioxidants and phytonutrients, your cat or dog needs vegetables.
Antioxidants are your pet’s best friend for maintaining health. They support your pet’s natural detoxification processes, helping to protect her against free radicals that can damage her cells and organs. Phytonutrients are powerful plant-based substances that support all kinds of health processes in your pet’s body. They boost gut and liver health, enhance her immune system response and support a healthy inflammatory response.
Green superfood grasses, like barley grass and wheatgrass, provide your pet with phytonutrients such as chlorophyll, phycocyanin and carotenoids, the plant sterol ester, beta-sitosterol, antioxidants and abundant vitamins and minerals.
Broccoli and kale are two other vegetables that supply valuable phytonutrients and antioxidants, such as naturally occurring sulforaphanes and indole-3 carbinol (I3C).
Canine and Feline Bodies Aren’t Designed to Eat Raw Plant Foods
Humans are omnivores, meaning you and I can survive on meat and vegetables. Cats and dogs, on the other hand, are carnivores, meaning they eat primarily meat.
Cats are obligatory carnivores, which means they need meat to survive. They may consume other foods, but their diet must consist of primarily meat for their bodies to be healthy.
Dogs, on the other hand, are considered scavenging carnivores. This means they are primary meat-eaters but can survive on plant materials if necessary.
Dogs and cats have eaten vegetables for thousands of years, but not exactly in the way you might imagine.
In the wild, wolves and coyotes – your dog’s ancestors – consume grass and berries, but they also get plants in their diet from the prey they eat. Many of the animals they rely on for food are plant-eaters. When they eat that prey, they also get the predigested plants in their digestive tracts.
Wild cats, being strict carnivores, don’t go looking for plant foods like dogs do. Instead, the vegetable matter they consume comes almost exclusively from the gastrointestinal tract of their prey.
Compared to herbivores like horses and rabbits, carnivores have shorter and simpler digestive systems. They don’t need a long, complex digestive system because their diets don’t typically contain the massive amounts of tough cellulose found in plants.
The plant material they get from their prey’s digestive system is partially digested, which allows their body to assimilate the nutrients without having to go through the work of breaking it down – a job their bodies aren’t designed to do.
The vegetables you feed to your pet should be as close as possible to what he would get in the wild, making it easy for him to digest.
The Best Ways to Feed Vegetables to Your Pet
Because your pet’s digestive system isn’t built to digest the cellulose fiber in plants, when you give them vegetables they should be finely chopped and lightly cooked. Or if you serve them raw, they should be minced or pulverized in a blender or juicer.
Just chopping or coarsely grating raw vegetables isn’t sufficient to make them digestible for cats and most dogs.
So, what kinds of vegetables are best for dogs and cats?
Carrots are an excellent source of potassium, fiber and the antioxidants alpha-carotene and beta-carotene.
While many dogs love carrots, both raw and cooked, they are high in sugar and should only be offered in moderation. Their small size can be a choking hazard, so they should be finely chopped.
Vegetables in the cruciferous family, such as broccoli, cabbage, kale and cauliflower are also great for dogs and cats, providing valuable antioxidants and phytonutrients. I recommend feeding them gently cooked and chopped finely or pureed. Never feed your pet onions or chives.
Why Fermented Vegetables Are Ideal for Pets
Fermented vegetables are optimally digestible for dogs and cats and provide many nutritional benefits.
Fermentation imitates the digestion of plant foods in the gastrointestinal tracts of the small-prey animal’s dogs and cats eat in the wild. This allows your pet to get the nutrition from the vegetables without putting undue strain on her shorter digestive tract.
The fermentation process used in the making of fermented vegetables:
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Pre-digests hard-to-digest plant foods.
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Reduces the sugar content in foods like carrots and beets to nearly zero.
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Improves vitamin and mineral bio-accessibility.
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Increases bioavailability of antioxidants and phytonutrients.
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Creates unique metabolites not normally in the food, like lactic acid.
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Increases the presence of some nutrients such as vitamin K2.
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Produces an end product that supports an alkalizing effect on the pH of your pet’s body.
Your pet benefits from the “pre-digestion” that happens with fermentation. The process effectively removes the simple carbs, converting their glucose content to alcohol, which then quickly evaporates. This is especially important with high-carb vegetables like carrots and beets.
As beneficial as fermented vegetables can be, you may be wondering, “How can I possibly get my finicky cat or dog to eat ‘twangy’ fermented vegetables?”
That’s exactly why we developed Bark & Whiskers® Fermented Superfoods – fermented vegetables formulated just for pets without any twangy taste.
Organic Fermented Food Can Help Raise the Nutrient Quotient of Your Pet’s Meal, without the ‘Twangy Taste’
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As much as I promote feeding fermented vegetables to dogs and cats, I realize many pets won’t eat them, especially obligate carnivore kitties.
Designed to be a topper that you sprinkle over or mix into your pet’s usual diet, my Bark & Whiskers® Fermented Superfoods supplement is formulated with your pet’s taste buds in mind.
When I took on the challenge of formulating a pet-friendly fermented food supplement, I thought taste might be an issue. However, we discovered that adding the fermented foods to a base of human-grade, organic cheddar cheese makes them irresistible to most dogs and cats, including my own.
There’s no ‘twangy taste’ like with regular fermented vegetables, so Fermented Superfoods makes it easy to give your pet the benefits of nutrient-rich organic vegetables and super green foods.
Our delicious blend is made from fermented organic whole foods, including broccoli, beets, carrots, kale, seaweed, ginger, and barley and wheat grasses.
Made with our unique processing methods, fermentation helps unlock the nutrients and makes them more digestible so your pet can absorb and utilize more nutrients from the vegetables in the product.
Easy-to-serve, this powdered superfood mix helps your pet get vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and polyphenols from vegetables in a shelf-stable form. No refrigeration required.
Organic Fermented Food Provides Measurable Nutrition for Vigorous Pet Health
We deliberately selected nutrient-rich superfoods that are organically grown for Bark & Whiskers® Fermented Superfoods. However, given the considerable variability in the nutrient content of vegetables, determining the final product’s precise nutrient composition poses a challenge.
Therefore , we put our finished product to the test through a third-party lab and we couldn’t be more delighted with what they found…
Our Fermented Superfoods tested as being a good source of vitamin A and K2, folate and iron, as well as antioxidants and polyphenols.
Vitamin A is essential for supporting vision, growth of bone and muscle, and reproduction. It’s especially important for cats and dogs who don’t regularly receive fresh organ meat or wild game meats.
Cats have a special requirement for vitamin A, which is available naturally only in animal tissue. While dogs can convert beta-carotene into the active form of vitamin A, cats lack the intestinal enzymes to make the conversion.
There’s not a lot of vitamin A in most conventional muscle meats, like chicken and beef (unless the beef is 100% grass fed) – the meats pets eat most. If there is any, it’s often destroyed in the high-heat processing used for commercial pet food.
All of the vitamin A in Fermented Superfoods is converted from beta-carotene to retinol during fermentation. That’s particularly valuable for your kitty since he lacks the ability to convert beta-carotene into retinol on his own.
Folate is another important nutrient for cats and dogs. It’s found mostly in green plant foods, but pets don’t usually eat leafy greens and broccoli, so you must find creative ways to get those in his diet.
Vitamin K2, a nutrient created by the fermentation process, is largely non-existent in most pet diets because they don’t include fermented foods. This special, hard-to-find form of vitamin K is essential for cardiovascular health.
Clearly, adding fermented foods to your pet’s meal can provide her with additional vitamins and minerals that she may not be receiving in her normal diet if it doesn’t include fresh vegetables.
Our fermentation process is a precise one. It uses a highly controlled process that interrupts the fermentation at its optimal point. This controlled fermentation process ensures optimal quality in Bark & Whiskers® Fermented Superfoods for pets.
Organic Fermented Food for Cats & Dogs Is Created by an Exceptional Company with a Long-Running Track Record
We’re proud of the quality of Bark & Whiskers® Fermented Superfoods. The fermentation process is carefully designed, and the organically grown vegetables in our product can even be traced to the actual farms and fields where they were grown.
We didn’t contract with just any manufacturer to create Fermented Superfoods – we wanted an outstanding company that specializes in fermented, sustainable and organic products. And that’s what we found…
In business since 1989, our manufacturer considers quality the backbone of their company. So, what does quality look like when it comes to my Fermented Superfoods for pets?
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Verification: Their supply source is well controlled and documented.
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Traceability: Their organically grown vegetables are not mixed together, so they can be traced to actual farms and fields.
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Sustainability: From raw material cultivation and harvesting to processing and extraction, all steps of the process are under their careful control and dedicated to maintaining ecological balance.
I can assure you I’ve done my due diligence to make sure you get the high-quality vegetables you expect for your pet.
Give Your Pet a Well-Deserved Nutrient Boost with Organic Fermented Foods for Cats & Dogs
Unless you’re feeding your pet a carefully balanced, homemade diet with fresh, organic vegetables, he may not be receiving all the vitamins, minerals, polyphenols and phytonutrients he needs.
Today’s commercially prepared pet foods use feed-grade, synthetic vitamin premixes to bring nutrient levels up to the minimum level. They are formulated to help pets survive, not necessarily thrive. But we all know there’s a big difference between merely surviving… and thriving.
For pets to truly thrive, they need proper nutrition. Bark & Whiskers® Fermented Superfoods provides the additional vitamins and minerals that may be missing from your pet’s diet.
Our unique fermentation process takes the nutrient value of even organic vegetables to a whole new level. Because fermentation imitates the digestion of plant foods in the gastrointestinal tracts of the small-prey animal’s dogs and cats eat in the wild, the end result is the best form of vegetables nature can provide for your pet.
Fermentation makes plant nutrients easier to digest and increases their bioavailability so your pet can benefit more from the vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and phytonutrients. Plus, it creates unique metabolites not normally found in plant foods, like beneficial lactic acid, and it increases important nutrients, like vitamin K2.
Convenient and easy to use, my organic white cheddar cheese-flavored superfood topper is sure to please even the fussiest feline, while providing a much-needed nutrient boost.
Provide your pet with the important nutrients he needs from the vegetables and super green foods missing from his diet, and order Bark & Whiskers® Fermented Superfoods today.