Home Prepared Cooked Diets for Cats & Dogs

Yes! Feeding a complete diet of fresh, whole foods, cooked or raw, is a wonderful way to provide your pet with excellent nutrition, provided the diet plan you follow is balanced for the known nutritional requirements of dogs and cats. Even if it’s only a few days per week, adding fresh, balanced meals or specific supplements to your pet’s diet is proven to contribute significantly to their overall health and happiness.

We have many recipes to choose from to meet your pet’s needs. We can customize recipes based on ingredients that you have on hand and can advise on specific recipes for medical conditions, including limited ingredient diets for food allergies, reduced protein for kidney disease and life-stage diets for puppies, kittens and adults. Our nutrition technician works with several sources to get your pet the support needed.

Supplement needs vary depending on the recipes are chosen. Recipes can be balanced with food ingredients; however, we often find that to keep the meals palatable, we need to supplement with some common vitamins like vitamin E and minerals such as calcium or zinc. All recipes require some oils like cod, salmon, safflower or hemp to optimize the fatty acid components of the recipe.

At Full Circle Veterinary Alternatives, we have multivitamin mixes and dehydrated vegetable mixes available for specific types of recipes. When our nutrition technician formulates a recipe for you, part of the instructions will be suggestions on where to source the recommended supplements if they are not available at our clinic. If you are committed to providing fresh food for your pet, then we are committed to helping make the transition as easy as possible for you.

Every pet is different in their makeup and health status, this means that somebody systems may digest cooked foods better than raw. There are also other situations where a cooked diet is preferred for safety. Though raw diets are very safe with proper handling and storing practices, if your pet or anyone else in the household has a compromised immune system due to treatments such as chemotherapy, we recommend cooked diets as such individuals may not be able to handle possible bacteria burdens from the raw foods.