Health Promoting Ingredients

We all want the best for our pets, especially when it comes to their health and nutrition. To support your pet’s health from the inside out, we recommend choosing foods and supplements with health promoting ingredients.

Let’s talk about three common conditions that benefit from health promoting ingredients:
• Skin and Coat • Digestive Health • Joint Health

Skin and Coat

Dry, flaky, itchy skin or brittle, dull hair? Skin and coat promoting ingredients can help restore your pet’s shiny, soft coat. Skin and Coat supplements include a variety of the below ingredients, packing an especially effective nutrient punch. These ingredients can also be found in many pet food themselves.
• Cold water fish oils (like salmon, pollack and anchovy oil).These contain omega 3 fatty acids and help fight the inflammation that sometimes causes excessive shedding. They also promote a shiny coat.
• Oils from most plants are loaded with omega 6 fatty acids. This promotes supple, moist skin and soft shiny coat.
• Biotin, niacin and riboflavin, are important to skin and coat health. They can be found as listed ingredient in an ingredient panel. Yeast, liver, and eggs are high in riboflavin. Meat, fish and grains are high in niacin.

Digestive Health

A healthy digestive system is essential to your pet’s well-being. Though it isn’t the most glamorous topic, understanding how it all works puts you in a better position to alleviate your pet’s digestive upset. Lucky for you and your pet, digestive problems are generally solvable.

• Digestive enzymes like amylase, protease, lipase and others are used by your pet’s digestive tract to breakdown and extract the nutrients from the ingredients they consume in their daily diets. You’ll usually see these listed on ingredients lists simply as “digestive enzymes.” As with probiotics, the addition of these ingredients may help decrease or eliminate gas and other ailments caused by poor digestion.

• Yucca Schidigera can help to control stool odor associated with digestive upset. About 20% of pet foods include this product. While Yucca reduces odor, it does not solve the underlying digestive issues.

Joint Health

Joint health is extremely important for our pets to live long, active lives. Pet parents can be proactive about joint-health by looking for foods with the ingredients listed below. If your pet is experiencing poor joint health, a supplement may be needed. Supplements have therapeutic levels of key ingredients that improve joint health in pets with existing joint problems.

• Glucosamine and chondroitin help to replace the components of joints that are naturally worn down in everyday or extreme or unexpected use. They are naturally present in meat cartilage sources found in your pet’s food.

• Vitamin E and C are both antioxidants, which help to prevent joint breakdown. Fruits and vegetables are excellent sources of antioxidants as well.

• Salmon and flax oils are a natural anti-inflammatory. This helps with healing, repair and discomfort of hurting joints.

• L-carnitine helps the pet to burn energy and promotes lean muscle mass. Staying thin will alleviate some of the burden on the joints, so this is a roundabout way to promote joint heath.

• Green Lipped Mussel, Sea Cucumber, and Turmeric each reduce inflammation and/or replace worn-down components in joints.

Important Note: Your pet’s needs may vary. The health promoting ingredients detailed here should be used as a general guide, not a substitute for taking your pet to the vet.