How to Naturally Strengthen Your Dog’s Digestive Tract

Your dog’s digestive tract is much more important than you realize. In addition to being responsible for breaking down food and removing toxins from the body, it also helps maintain the strength of the immune system, thanks to the many beneficial bacteria found in the gut. These friendly bacteria help identify, attack, and remove pathogens from the body. So when the digestive system is weak, the immune system is likely to follow.

Thankfully, though, there are steps that you can take every day to improve the health of your dog’s digestive tract without having to spend a ton of money. And it can all be done naturally too.

Starting Off with High Quality Foods

The food that you feed to your dog every day will have a huge impact on the health of his digestive tract, so you definitely want to be sure that your dog’s body is getting the right nutrition. If you’re currently feeding the typical big name dog food brands, take a look at the ingredients. You want to avoid any foods containing allergenic grains (specifically corn, wheat, and soy), but you also want to avoid meat by-products, which are pretty much all of the undesirable animal parts left over from the meat industry.

The easiest way to upgrade your dog’s food is by switching to a high quality brand that boasts all natural ingredients, vitamins, minerals, fruits, and vegetables. This is a great first step in ensuring your dog’s body is getting the nutrition it needs to keep disease at bay. Look for whole ingredients on the label to be sure you’re feeding nutritious cuts of meat.

Adding Probiotics to Your Dog’s Diet

You’ve probably heard of probiotics for humans, but you may not have known that they can also boost the health of your canine friend. Look for canine-specific probiotics, as their bodies require different strains than humans do.

When supplementing your dog’s food with probiotics, you’re essentially adding even more of those friendly, beneficial bacteria into the digestive tract. Probiotics are often used for a variety of ailments, but they can certainly be added to your dog’s food, especially as he gets older, in order to ensure the body is properly breaking down food and absorbing enough nutrients while keeping the immune system strong.

Adding Digestive Enzymes to the Diet

Another step that you can take involves adding canine-specific digestive enzymes to your dog’s food. As your dog gets older, his pancreas will be less able to produce sufficient amounts of digestive enzymes, which are responsible for breaking down food to make it easier for the body to extract and absorb nutrients from it. This is especially true for dogs who are fed cooked foods rather than raw diets because canned and dry foods are cooked at such high temperatures that naturally-occurring enzymes are lost, putting more of a strain on the pancreas. This can lead to serious digestive problems and result in deficiencies. But by simply supplementing the diet with these enzymes, you’ll be making it easier on your dog’s body.

By taking the right steps today to feed your dog a high quality diet supplemented with probiotics and digestive enzymes, you can prevent serious health problems in the future by maintaining the health of the digestive tract and the strength of the immune system.