Understanding How Protein Provides Optimal Health for Pets

Protein is an important part of your pet’s diet. Protein, which is made of amino acids, plays a significant role in optimal health for pets. It helps support muscles, skin health, nails and coat. Protein is also essential for supporting a strong immune system and is an essential source of energy. Without enough protein in their diet, it forces their body to break down muscles to fill the gap of their needed amino acids. That will ultimately lead to nutritional deficiencies and overall health issues. It is so important to understand why your pet requires dietary protein before you can decide which is the best nutritional diet for your pet’s optimal health.

Amino acids are the building components of proteins. They play important roles in genes, cells and metabolic pathways. When your pet eats protein, his body breaks it down into amino acids so it can absorb and use them.  Dogs and cats need 22 amino acids to be at a cellular level. Dogs can synthesize 12 of these amino acids and cats can synthesize 11 of them. The remaining amino acids must come from their diet. Those are called essential amino acids. Protein provides the essential amino acids that dogs and cats cannot synthesize on their own. Dogs and cats require these essential amino acids in sufficient quantities to obtain optimal health.

Not all proteins are the same quality, and poor-quality dietary protein can create havoc by being harder for your pet to digest. It is so important that you provide your pet with good quality, digestible forms of protein. That ensures your pet can derive the essential amino acids from the protein it requires. Digestibility of a protein will be determined by the bioavailability of amino acids derived from proteins in the food. All dietary proteins have a biologic value measured in percentage terms, which tells you the usable amino acid content of the protein. The higher the biologic value, the more beneficial it will be for your pet. All fresh meat and fish have a high biologic value. If your pet’s diet contains animal derivatives or animal by-products, it may have a high crude protein level. It may also have a low biologic value, meaning that your pet’s body cannot easily absorb and make use of this type of protein to gain the essential amino acids to avoid metabolic stress to the digestive system, causing the metabolism extra work. If you are feeding your dog grains or plant sources, these incomplete sources of protein can start to cause amino acid deficiency in your pet. They are low in essential amino acids. With the biologic value of animal-based proteins being quite high, your pet will be very healthy on fresh meat and organs. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t feed plant based proteins to your dog. You should just feed them as a complement to animal proteins. Plants shouldn’t be the main source of protein and cats don’t have any need for plants or grains in their diet at all.

Eggs have the highest biologic value of all dietary protein, followed by chicken, fish and beef, for example. All animal proteins have a purpose in the diet for our pets. Some are cooling, some are warming and some are hot. Depending on the time of year and the temperature your dog runs, can depend on the protein to feed during the year. It is so important to rotate proteins in the diet to gain the benefits from each animal and to help your pet reach optimal health on a cellular level.

We know different animals have different fat content, amino acid profiles and temperatures. Each pet has different nutrient requirements that need to be met. By understanding how the body processes the food we feed, we can give our pets the proper nutrition to support their organs and allow them to thrive in life! QCBN

By Sandy Haffner

Sandy Haffner is a pet nutrition specialist and owner of Preskitt’s Pawz ‘N’ Clawz.