Hi there, I’ve read some great discussions about raw diets here, and I have a question that I haven’t seen answered yet. I know there are concerns about raw diets being unbalanced if done incorrectly. Is there anything a pet owner can do to make sure their cat or dog is getting everything they need from a raw diet? I know it’s important to be mindful of what exactly is making up the diet, but I’m talking more about medical tests that can be done on the animal to make sure they’re getting all their essential nutrients. Is there a specific kind of bloodwork that can be done to check this, or something like that? Is a check like that something that you’d recommend doing somewhat frequently (yearly?) for pets on a raw or mostly-raw diet? I’m sorry if this is a dumb question, I don’t know much about vet med but I’m trying to learn 🙂
vet-and-wild here.
The best thing you can do if you have your pet on any kind of home prepared diet (raw or cooked) or want to put them on one of those diets is to work with a veterinary nutritionist. They will be able to tell you if a diet is balanced. There isn’t necessarily routine blood work that looks at nutrients. We may run a test to check taurine levels on a dog with a murmur that is on a grain free/raw/home prepared diet, but it’s not something that’s done frequently.
Ferox here.
Practically speaking you can do blood tests to check levels of certain nutrients and vitamins, but they’re jolly expensive to do so and mostly done in livestock situations where a herd is not thriving. And even then, some blood tests are not as accurate as tissue biopsies would be, and that’s just not practical for pets.
If you wanted to do a blood test to assess nutritional intake it would probably cost between 5 and 8 times more than a standard blood profile would be, and you’d still need to interpret it within the context of a physical exam, and remember that any nutritional changes might take up to 8 weeks to start showing up clinically.
This is a particular reason why I’m very strongly against raw feeding for puppies. Those diets are basically always low in calcium and a nutritional deficiency gets worse quicker in a rapidly growing animal.
