Category: Health

Glutathione — the king of antioxidants

Healthy Dog Club

The glutathione antioxidant is a tiny but powerful nutrient that is vital to your dogs cell health, liver function and immunity. Mention antioxidants, and most people think of vitamin C or beta carotene. But there are other, less commonly known antioxidants that are even more important to overall health and well being. One of these is glutathione. It’s a tiny but powerful and abundant protein compound made up of three amino acids. This antioxidant exists in every single cell of your dog’s body, where it protects the minuscule but important…

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How you can engage your pup during quarantine

Healthy Dog Club

Be it a cold day, a rainy day, a shelter- at-home order, or a day when you just want to have some enjoyable quality time with your pup, there are plenty of indoor games you can play at home with your dog. A simple, classic indoor game is hide and seek. Since dogs lead first with their nose, then their ears and lastly, their eyes, you want to design your hide and seek game appropriately. A dog’s sense of smell is estimated to be anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 times…

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Boost your pups immunity with probiotics

Healthy Dog Club

Just like in humans, the majority of a dog’s immune system resides in his gut. Im sure you have heard about the gut and brain axis and the importance it has for our mental and physical well being. The gut is the largest immune organ in the body and contains approximately 70% of all immune cells. So keeping your dog’s digestive system running optimally is essential to making sure that he stays healthy, active, and lives a full and healthy life. One way to potentially improve your dog’s digestive health…

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Should I Give My Dog Supplements?

Healthy Dog Club

Vitamins and supplements found at health stores and pharmacies are all the rage these days — from multivitamins to specialty supplements that are designed to support specific bodily functions. So does that mean you should also add a supplement to your pet’s daily ration of food to keep him or her healthy? Not only is this not necessarily true for most dogs, in some cases it can be harmful. Commercial pet foods are formulated to meet all the nutrient requirements a dog needs to thrive. Unlike our diets, which vary…

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Is Vitamin E Good for Dogs?

Healthy Dog Club

Vitamin E is an essential part of the canine diet … but why? To understand its role in the body, we need to delve into the interactions between free radicals and antioxidants. According Dr. Jennifer Coates, author of the Dictionary of Veterinary Terms: Vet-speak Deciphered for the Non-Veterinarian, free radicals are “a group of atoms containing oxygen and electrons that can damage cell membranes, proteins, DNA and other parts of the body.” Coates says that free radicals form as a normal part of the metabolic processes that produce energy within…

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Older dogs and cataracts

Healthy Dog Club

Our 15 year old girl Nadya, a bichon/poodle mix has pretty much lost her sight the past 2 years. It has been a slow progression and I have desperately tried to look for options to have her gain back at least some of the vision, even if blurry. I came across some great research by Dr Wendell O. Belfield, D.V.M. a pioneer of nutritional therapy for pets, cites human studies that show vitamin C improves the vision of elderly patients suffering from cataracts. He describes one veterinarian who successfully treated…

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What every vet and pet owner should know about vaccines

Healthy Dog Club

Are you confused about how often your dog needs vaccines? Let’s look at the core vaccines and what research has to say about how often they should be given. But before we do, you should first understand that the core dog vaccines (parvovirus, distemper and adenovirus) are not required by law. Only rabies is legally required in the all states in the US and some (not all) Canadian provinces. So apart from rabies, nobody can force you to vaccinate your dog with any other vaccine you don’t want to give. Period.…

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Dangerous Levels of Vitamin D Discovered in Several Dog Food Brands

Healthy Dog Club

The FDA is alerting pet owners and veterinary professionals about recalls of several dry dog foods after receiving complaints that dogs eating the food experienced vitamin D toxicity. Testing found that samples of the affected foods contained as much as 70 times the intended amount of vitamin D. Very high levels of vitamin D can cause serious health problems in dogs, such as kidney failure or death. Veterinarians should be aware that vitamin D toxicity may present as hypercalcemia, similar to dogs that have consumed a rodent killer.

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