Rotation of foods

[Jillian]

I was going back through all the older topics about diet, and the kibbles that people prefer. Quite a few times I saw people mentioning how they feed two different types of kibble, or how they rotate kibble. However, I wasn't able to find the reasoning or explanation behind this. Can someone who does this let me know? I am very interested in finding out if this will be beneficial to my own dogs.

 

Thanks!

[MaggieDog]

I do this for several reasons, though none really have any scientific reasoning behind them, they make sense to me.

 

1) To provide some variety in their diet. Since the toppers (yogurt and supplements) don't change, I can at least change the flavor every month or so. I'd get bored eating the same thing day after day, so that's part of my reasoning there.

 

2) To keep their tummies accepting of new dietary things. Both of my girls can switch foods cold turkey, but neither came that way. I noticed that I no longer needed to d a gradual switch a few months after I started rotating foods when I accidentally ran completely out and was forced to go cold turkey. It makes sense to me that if you're used to variety, then your system will adjust more easily and my anecdotal knowledge seems to support that.

 

3) To ensure that they get complete nutrition. I'm sure each food has it's own unique balance of nutrients and therefore it is possible that a single diet could be slightly incomplete in some form of nutrient. Switching brands and flavors of food would up the odds that the dogs never have a longterm lack of a certain nutrient. This is a reason I hear cited by other rotational feeders as one of their main ones for rotating foods, but it's kind of a nice side effect for me since I do doubt that a food would be so significantly deficient that it could cause issues.

[WildFlower]

I don't rotate foods but do use a mixture of two different types of food. I do this for complete dietary nutrition.

 

I have a cat that has had some digestive issues in the past. I switched her to a particular brand of grain free food and fed it to her exclusively for 2 years. She in that time developed bladder stones. The vet indicated that it was most likely the lack of variation in her diet and that particular food most have something in it that causes this (other people on this board have had the same problem.)

 

So now, I have both my dog and my cat on a more varied diet.

[Root Beer]

Variety - both for the sake of the dog's enjoyment of their food, and for nutritional variety. No food is perfectly and completely nutritionally balanced, in spite of the claims on the package.