NuVet Vitamins

Question
HI. I have an 11 week old Goldendoodle. I saw in your bio that you are also a nutritionalist. What are your thoughts on vitamins for puppies. Our breeder strongly recommended NuVet Plus vitamin supplements as very pure, human grade, natural supplements. Our vet thought if the puppy is eating well it should not be necessary. (Nutro Natural Choice is his kibble). Curious for your thought as they are quite expensive ($108 for 6 month supply). My family and I all take vitamins and eat quite well, so curious as to your thoughts.

Answer
Your puppy doesn't need a supplement- he needs a good diet and he isn't on one now. He is on one of the worst ones on the market. If you want your dog to be healthy and strong give him precision nutrition- not a brand that puts in too much of one thing to make up for the lack of quality ingredients that they make their food with.

You are using a Natural diet so switch to Hill's Science Diet Nature's Choice Puppy. It's the only food on the market that is a fixed-formula which means that it stays the same, batch after batch. Hill's is now the only food that I know of that stays with fixed-formulations. I used to recommend Iams to some people but they abandoned the fixed formulation in lieu of higher profits with less costly (and quality!) ingredients.

Not so with Hills. They have been dedicated to researching and creating the highest quality foods for our pets for over 50 years.
They were the first to discover the connection between the high phosphorus/calcium diet and hip dysplasia in large breed dogs and created the first diet line to combat it.

Puppies given precise nutrition do no need supplements and these can actually be harmful to your dog. Excess nutrients are just as detrimental as a lack of proper nutrients.

Here are some links to Hill's foods for you to explore. Since your dog is a large breed dog, the Large Breed Puppy Growth would benefit your pup the most, but the Nature's Best is an excellent food and would work fine.

Here is the link for Nature's Best:
http://www.hillspet.com/hillspet/products/productDetails.hjsp?PRODUCT%3C%3Eprd_i...

And for all the information you could want about nutrition, large breed foods and a 3 bag challenge for you to save money with.

http://www.hillspet.com/hillspet/products/productDetails.hjsp?PRODUCT%3C%3Eprd_i...

http://www.feedingisbelieving.com/believe/productClaimsForm.jsp?species=dog_&lif...

http://www.feedingisbelieving.com/believe/value.jsp

I hope you can see by this that Science Diet with its 50 years of research and dedication to our pets health, is the best food on the market. I have been feeding it for 28 years and recommending it longer than that. I have seen amazing transformations and my own pets live longer than ones on other brands and live healthy illness free lives. My cat just passed at 15 and she never had a sick day in her life. My other cat Floyd lived to be 19 without a single sick day in his life and my dog Cameo, who was a rescue with heartworms, was treated and lived 5 years longer than her breed standard and was never sick a day in her life.

So seeing is believing, feeding is believing.
Start your puppy out with a great foundation and then move him into Large Breed Adult and you too will become a believer. Hills is the only food that gives a 100% money back guarantee. If you don't see a change or your dog doesn't like it, you can take back the empty bag to the place you bought it and get your money back. Not many foods will do that for you.

I do NOT work for Hills in case you are wondering. I DO know and believe it is the best food. My five certificates in Small Animal Nutrition are not all from Hills. I have studied other brands intensively as well.

We on the other hand, eat a variety of foods and sometimes those are not always optimal foods for us. Unless we eat organically, we eat foods grown on depleted soils or those that are bolstered with chemicals. So vitamins are important for us.
It is difficult to eat such a pure diet for us anymore and we also don't eat one food that has a balance in it of nutrients the way our pets do. So yes, for us, it is good to take supplements now and then depending on our circumstance. I take some and I eat organically and vegetarian.

So there you go Sara. Let me know if you have any other questions. NuVet, by the way, is always pushed by those who sell it or don't know much about real nutrition. In our experience, that includes most breeders.