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April 2023
Home Cooking For Your Dog ?
There's an easier way
A
fter dog years of practice, our puppies have mealtime begging down to a choreographed art.
Picture them as you serve up your latest dish - or unpack your gourmet UberEats
smorgasbord. Puppy-eyes and perfectly-postured sits. A zen-like focus you never thought a
dog could muster, broken only by the cutest nose-wriggle ever. And then, after a while,
comes the piéce de résistance - a cautiously expectant tail-wag and slobbered chin (we won’t
mention the effect on the hardwood floor) as you spoon hot butter and rosemary over that
fresh cut of prime beef. If you’re like us, caving into the temptation and ‘subtle’ salesmanship
of our dogs is easy. And why not? We love them, and if it’s good for us, it must be good for
them, right?
More and more, we see dog owners shifting away rom traditional dry and wet foods
altogether, and incorporating their dogs into the home cooking schedule. And we totally get
it. Some of us home-cook for our puppies because… well, they’re not really puppies in our
eyes. Fur-babies is a more apt term.
At the very least they’re part of the family, and sharing
and preparing fresh food for those you hold dear is an expression of love and care.
Fresh, whole food - CHECK
Varied and tasty treats - CHECK
Cooking as a puppy love language - DOUBLE CHECK
So what's the catch ?
Striking the Right Nutritional Balance
It turns out that preparing a nutritionally-balanced meal for our furry friends is easier said
than done. Take a guess at how many different nutrients they need.
10? Higher.
20? Warmer,
but Melbourne ‘warmer’. So keep going.
Surely no more than 25, right? Nup.
40?
Now you’re scorching. Outback desert scorching.
The ilume Dog Food doggy dietitians have crunched the numbers and found that almost 40 nutrients are
required every day to keep our fur babies healthy, and within a strict range too.
Research
suggests these numbers are rarely hit in home-cooked meals. Sometimes there’s too much,
sometimes too little. Often, entire nutrients are missing. At ilume, we’ve tried to bring
together the best of both worlds. We’ve taken our team's wealth of knowledge, mixed it with
the love and care of fresh, homestyle cooking, and prepared a suite of meal options that hit
the nutritional mark every time
Nutritionaly balanced dog food that tastes as good as home cooked.
Learn More About ilume Fresh Dog FoodPortions and Ingredients
Striking a balance between portion sizing and macronutrient contents is a challenge. With
cases of doggy obesity increasing (and overfeeding being the cause 87% of the time),
maintaining appropriate dietary intake requires planning time and an understanding of your
dog’s size, breed and activity level - to name a few parameters.
Additionally, it’s important to
know what your dog can and can’t eat - avocados, garlic and onions, for example, are off the
table.
At ilume Dog Food, our team of dietitians provide a customised feeding guide that factors all of this in,
and more, taking the guesswork out of home-cooked, human-quality feeding regimens.
Additionally, all included whole ingredients are human-grade, which means better digestion
for your pup and smaller, less smelly poos for you to deal with.
ilume Dog Food is made from human grade ingredients, just like you'd make at home
Learn More About ilume Fresh Dog FoodTime vs Convenience.
Home cooking has a bunch of positives compared to traditional wet and dry dog food, but
doing it right requires a lot of time and effort on your part.
ilume Dog Food takes all the love and care
you would ordinarily put into your dog’s meals, tailors a suite of whole, human-grade
ingredients for their dietary needs, and packages them into a convenient, naturally-preserved
package (think rosemary, vinegar and citric acid).
Time-saved, tailor-made, and delivered
straight to your door. How good.
We think home-cooking is great when done right, and a lot of the principles of ilume come
from the same wheelhouse. Fresh, whole ingredients of human quality, created by people who
love their fur-babies and want to express that through food.
The key differences rest with
convenience and time-saving; the need to consult veterinary nutritionists and cook nightly for
your dog is something we’ve already done for you. All you need to do is serve up the
delicious recipes.
Bon appetit!
Article credit: Written by the ilume Dog Food Nutrition and Science Team.