Feeding Fido better food

If you really want to know what is in the food you feed your pet, there is one sure way -- prepare it yourself.

Not only is it possible to make your pet's food from items purchased at the grocery store, but also it makes good economic sense, as these meals can be cooked for pennies a day. But how do you know if you are meeting the nutritional requirements of your animal charge?

"Dinner PAWsible: A Cookbook of Healthy Dog & Cat Meals" by Cathy Alinovi, DVM, and Susan Thixton (CreateSpace, $24.95), takes the guesswork out of preparing pet food at home. This well-illustrated, clearly written paperback offers a wide selection of recipes for both cats and dogs.

The ingredients -- such as canned oysters, chicken, eggs, peas, apples, rice and cheese -- are usually found in a well-stocked pantry. Nothing unique here. The recipes are quite easy to prepare, can be frozen, and because they are all cooked, the issues of salmonella contamination are minimal.

Alinovi holds a degree from Purdue University's School of Veterinary Medicine. In addition to mainstream medicine, she has studied veterinary food therapy at the Chi Institute in Florida, and utilizes chiropractic, herbal, acupuncture and aroma therapies at her Pine Village, Ind., practice. She is a student of homeopathy and is completing her training in advanced functional neurology.

Her co-writer, Thixton, is a well-known pet-food activist who was dubbed the "Caped Crusader for Safe Pet Food" even before the Chinese pet-food scare. She founded the website TruthaboutPetFood.com, which provides education and a content breakdown on most major pet-food brands.

Both women have a strong belief that the distillers grain and by-products found in many commercial pet foods do not belong in feline or canine food, and they hope their book will make transitioning pets to a healthier diet easier and less intimidating for pet owners.

She began to cook for her animals after her family grew to include 10 dogs and many cats. Preparing food at home just made good economic sense. She says that even with a professional discount, her pet-food bill was becoming prohibitive. These days, she estimates she spends 10 to 15 minutes a day on pet-food prep. But until about five years ago, she was on the commercial-food bandwagon with the rest of us.

"My favorite dog, Lady, has been itchy ever since I adopted her in 2001. I fed her 'the best' prescription diet for allergies that was out there -- and she still itched. I attended a seminar about allergies about five years ago and discovered the seminar was really about what we feed pets."

She decided to switch foods, and in three days, Lady stopped scratching.

"I discovered she was allergic to grain. The prescription foods are full of grain. She also stopped shedding. So then I figured this applied to all my patients, and I've been working on them ever since. Now I find that 80 percent of what people bring their pets to me for, I can fix through nutrition," she says.

While the pet-food companies claim their food is 100 percent nutritionally complete, and additional supplements are unnecessary, Alinovi says that humans don't get all of their nutrition from a single meal, and neither should pets.

"Let's balance our pets' food over a few meals, too."

And while she cooks all the meals for her own animals, she says feeding your pet better shouldn't be complicated or stressful, even if you don't want to be a slave to the stove.

"People need to do what is comfortable. The key is to feed quality nutrition. Just like us humans, the better we eat, the better we feel. If all we eat is prepackaged food with an ingredient list longer than our arm, we won't feel as good as we do from (healthy home-cooked) food," she says.

So even one home-cooked meal per day is an improvement on an all-commercial diet.

Thixton says that the tainted-food crisis of 2007 played a large part in making the public more open to alternative diets for pets. So people were ready for this book.