Notes for Buying Healthy and Nutritional Pet Food
2008-07-31

Notes for Buying Proper Pet Supplies

Every pet, young or old, must have a daily source of nutrients to help replenish their body's' needed resources. Supplement can play an important role in your pet’s growing and it is necessary to give your pet a concentrated whole food supplement. Therefore, you should learn some tips in finding a proper supplement for your pet. What are pet supplements? Pet supplements are defined as either dietary or therapeutic supplements. Dietary supplements are substances added to pet foods to make them nutritionally complete and balanced. Therapeutic supplements are foods or food nutrients that are taken orally to provide a health benefit, either for prevention or treatment of disease. To have this therapeutic effect, a nutraceutical is usually taken in a larger dose than the daily requirement of that same food when used as a nutrient. There are thousands of pet health conditions that may be appropriately treated using one or several of the numerous pet supplements available.

Where can we get information about pet supplement? We can usually learn about pet supplements through friends, retail stores, Internet, media advertisement or from health care providers. These sources may provide dated information and may only include the well-documented indications for specific nutrients and relate primarily to nutritional requirements rather than their uses as nutraceuticals. However, it’s important for us to pay more attention to our own pet and buy supplement only for he/she while this information may be incomplete or biased at times. Is a pet supplement always effective? Take an example as the following, if a dog starts taking pet supplement "A", starts a new natural dog food and starts getting more exercise, the observed changes may be due to any one of the factors, to a combination of all three, or even to a placebo effect. At least, it tells us that it is difficult to determine whether the supplement effective or not. However, it is common for multiple supplements to be given simultaneously or in conjunction with other lifestyle changes. Therefore, to further complicate the issue of effectiveness, some supplements are only effective after they have been given for long periods of time, and the patient may continue to show some of the positive effects for a few weeks after the pet supplement has been discontinued. Is any pet supplements safe? You must notice that a natural pet product does not mean it is safe. All medicines and medicinal plants are potentially toxic if used inappropriately or given in excess. Use a supplement without a little uncertainty. In order to make sure, you can take these two ways: firstly, getting information about pet supplements from your pet supplements; secondly, consult the manufacturer of the product. If there is reliable information about the product's safety and efficacy in animals, the manufacturer should be able to provide you with this. If the manufacturer is unwilling to provide any information, it is safer to not use that pet supplement. Are you familiar with the market? It is true that more popular brand name pet supplements are loaded with fillers. Anytime you get anything in a tablet form, just the process of tableting deteriorates the supplement, so you are not getting as much of the supplement that is listed on the label. The show 60 minutes did an exposé on pet supplement companies about four or five years ago, and they took the top four or five brand name companies and found out that only two out of the five had the supplements that were on their label. So , you need to be familiar with the market in advance. Quality control and quality assurance Quality control provides a measure of assurance over what a product contains, both with respect to its medicinal ingredients and its purity. Not all manufacturers share the same concerns about ensuring that their products are high-quality, free of contaminants, contain consistent levels of active ingredients and retain their potency after processing.

Regulations about packaging of pet supplements With pharmaceutical products, the manufacturer is governed by strict legislation about contents and labeling. Unfortunately, not all natural health products have been reviewed, particularly those being prescribed as pet supplements. Because of the lack of this control, there is no guarantee of the package contents or product strength. This leaves it up to us to become informed about the integrity and ethics of the manufacturer to provide any measure of assurance that the product is effective and unadulterated. A pet supplement label or package When you pick up a product, turn to its package, you had better to check the name and contact information of the manufacturer which should contain information about its contents, ideally with some sort of minimum analysis of the active ingredients, also information about any inert of carrier substances that are present. For herbal products, the label should also include the Latin name of the plant, a harvest date or an expiration date, the part of the herb used and the amount of active ingredient.