As a pet parent, building the best diet for your dog is your priority. This cannot be taken lightly, as the food you feed your dog is highly reflective of its well-being. In this article, we enlist three key tips for ensuring that your dog eats healthy:

1. Don’t fall for the marketing or hype

In today’s world, we are busy trying to get the best and tend to believe everything that leading brands say. What’s important is to stop relying on just advertisements and read the labels. This will tell you what a particular product actually contains. When you check the labels, you need to look at the order of the ingredients in order to know which ones are dominant. For this process to be effective, you need to first research and create a list of all the foods you would like to feed your dog, based on its breed, medical conditions, etc. This will help you narrow down the best foods and not make you blindly rely on ones that don’t even meet the basic nutrient requirements of your dog.

2. Check your dog’s existing diet

More often than not, due to convenience, you may end up picking shelf-stable foods as the primary food for your dog. This is not a good idea, because you are essentially feeding your dog only processed foods that are brimming with preservatives. Most of these foods do not have any live enzymes, and this leaves your dog with a scattered diet rather than a fuller one. If you can’t prepare elaborate meals for your dog all the time, then choose brands that have the least amount of preservatives and colorants, and use more natural ingredients instead.

3. Introduce fresh, whole foods to the diet

This is highly important for a dog’s diet—you need to make sure that your dog’s diet has the right balance of all the essential nutrients. And this can be made possible by introducing fresh, lean meats and even vegetables and fruits. Lean meats are healthy and high in proteins, and dogs thrive on high animal proteins. Additionally, certain vegetables and fruits are filled with fiber, which is required to improve the digestion process. In contrast to shelf foods that burn out the nutrients due to the addition of preservatives, these natural foods contain actual nutrients that are crucial to a dog’s health. However, remember that not all human foods are suited for dogs, and they must be fed with care and caution. Ensure that you speak to your vet and map out a diet plan before making any additions or subtractions yourself.

Some of the other critical facts that you need to remember are to ensure that you feed a variety of foods to your dog, all of which should be rich in essential nutrients. You need to add more raw meat to your dog’s diet. Keep gluten away, and replace rice with green lentils, as they’re a better source of proteins. By following these tips, you should be able to enrich your dog’s diet and keep many health problems at bay.