Improve Your Dog’s Dental Health with Healthy Treats

The two main customer and dog requirements for dental hygiene are clean teeth and better smelling breath.  There are dog foods that claim to help with this, but mostly they mask the issues or fail miserably.  The other option is using toothbrushes and toothpaste, and if you use these to clean your dog’s mouth regularly, the teeth can be pristine, but not every owner has trained their dog to enjoy this experience.

We look at the most proactive methods of keeping dog teeth clean via healthy dog treats, as well as providing the best nutrition at the same time. We will also look at why buying artificial green vegetable-based cleaning sticks are a bad idea.

Review of ‘dog food’ cleaning options

These bags can be called ‘dental’ ‘oral care’ etc.  They allege to be useful for dogs to assist in removing plaque and tartar build-up.

They will often say things like their kibble are created to have textures and shapes that mimic a tooth brush so that the dog’s teeth are cleaned as they eat. So essentially, they are the same nutrient formulation as they use in most of their other products, with the exception that they might have something added to make the surface slightly harder or some other secret.

These pellets often look almost exactly the same as the original pellets but somehow magically have a different surface that is more abrasive to scrape off plague etc.

Almost all kibble or dog food pellets are made the same way. A mixture of powdered ingredients often with up to 70% non-meat (either grain or vegetable matter), is wetted (or uses the original fats and water content of the ingredients, and is extruded through pipes at high speed. As it emerges from the industrial tube, it is cut by a spinning blade and heated at high temperature so they the pellets clump. This is the most economical and fastest method of producing high volumes of commercial “food” however the dough needs to be fairly soft for the extrusion process. Besides the inherent low natural nutrition (without the addition of a LOT of minerals and vitamins), the pellets are then heated (often very highly) which can compromise nutrition further.

The reason that you should know about this is that this process usually creates pellets that when eaten buy dogs crumble and leave sugar (carb crumbs) on their teeth. That crumbling then helps rot the teeth and give the dog’s with bad breath. If the kibble was too hard to eat, it could either damage the teeth, or worse for the manufactures, the dogs wouldn’t consume it fast enough so that any feeling of satiety (feeling satisfied and full) effect could occur. They prefer the dog doesn’t feel full, otherwise it would not eat as much of the product and you wouldn’t replace it so quickly.

It’s ironic for all of the goodness that kibble dog food exposes in its advertising, that the majority are meant to create obese dogs, and rot their teeth, unless you buy their compressed green veggie sticks or pay for expensive vet teeth cleaning.

Dog’s Dental Health Improvement with Healthy good chewing Treats

This is one of the positive side effects of eating genuinely natural food for your dog.

Small dogs can often struggle with teeth cleaning, because they have soft jaw pressure, so many of the treats we have put in the soft treat category are intended to get more meat protein into a small or puppy or senior dog’s diet.

The small treats might not provide a great deal more teeth cleaning than the ‘dental’ kibble, though that said, because even the things like the meat balls are around 80% meat (not 30- 40% like dog food), the natural integrity of meat pieces (as opposed to ground grains) means that even the balls don’t usually fall apart and stick to a dogs teeth as much as most dog food.

The MEDIUM chewing category is where the better teeth cleaning options reside. Typically, any 100% meat jerky (fish, beef jerky, kangaroo jerky, pork etc) – anything that takes a dog longer to chew and swallow than kibble, provides better teeth cleaning options. The jerkies split apart, and scrape plaque and tartar build-up off the teeth NATURALLY.

Even if a chihuahua has to carry around one roo tendon all day long before it devours it. That whole carrying their food, and the slow chewing, gives great satisfaction AND teeth cleaning AND nutrition!

The big bonus with our healthy dog treats is that they also provide MEAT protein which is more bio available (easier) for your dog to use.

Clearly this also goes for our LONG-LASTING dog treats category too.

The reason that our healthy dog treats are so great with dental hygiene is that they also naturally take care of ‘bad breath’ in most cases.

The curious thing here, is that some owners will not always like some of the stronger smelling treats we have like fish etc, but that smell is amplification of smell when the treat gets wet from saliva.

But since the 100% meat products have NO CARBS (SUGARS) in them, they don’t have the chance of sugar sticking to the dog’s teeth when they are eating our natural treats. And hence the treat only smells (which most dogs REALLY LOVE), while the dog is eating them, NOT causing bad breath AFTER they have swallowed the treat.

The jerkies actually cleaning some of the dog food kibble crumbs off the teeth reduces the bad smell from that debris too.

But why shouldn’t dogs eat dental sticks?

The companies that cause the dog’s bad teeth and worse breath, have created a market for their dental sticks. And because someone in a lab coat or sponsored vet, tells you that they are good, you should trust them right? No.

Fact is, that a stick in the park or broken dog toy can often work as good as a dental stick, if all you are after is scraping off what the kibble has deposited. But that doesn’t add to their nutrition, nor is it necessarily safe.

We work on the theory that most dog owners love their dogs so much, they are often tempted to over feed their dogs.  But if you feed more kibble, or you are doing is feeding more carbs (the majority component in dog food), but really what you want to be doing is feeding more meat protein (protein that the dog’s stomachs can easily use).

If you feed your dog the exact right amount of kilo-joules to keep them in perfect weight, then any treat, even dental stick you are feeding them is going to add to the dog’s weight. Since dog food, and dental sticks are NOT all meat, you are adding more kilo-joules to your dog, but not any more of the quality PROTEIN found in meat.

Kibble contains the bare minimum protein required by the affco labels, but that is the BARE minimum, and many nutritionist don’t believe that if the bare minimum is made up of low bio-available protein Like from plant matter, that dogs are actually receiving adequate amounts of protein for body maintenance, growth and to fight infection etc.

CONCLUSION

As you can see, healthy dog treats, particularly 100% animal-based treats with natural structural integrity, provide natural teeth cleaning, help reduce bad breath AND add meat-based nutrition to your dogs diet.

Healthy dog treats are not ‘frankensteined’ by a large corporation that are mostly interested in selling you more vegetables for your carnivore dog. We don’t have to create interesting and useless patterns on kibble or a green stick to get your dog’s teeth cleaned.

EVERY gram of healthy dog treats contributes to your dog’s nutrition needs and health. Don’t waste and opportunity to keep your dog healthy and happy, naturally.