Is Glucasamine supplementation in your pets food enough ?

If your pet has arthritis, or hip displaysia, and his condition needs some TLC.

What do most pet owners look for in this case? Glucosamine. As an effective anti-inflammatory, glucosamine is one of the most widely used components in senior pet foods and joint supplements.

Many pet food manufacturers recognize that as dogs get older and their bodies begin to wear down, pet owners will eventually look for products to help their aging pets. Old dogs eat “senior” dog food, right? So why not add glucosomine to your pets’ senior dog food and cover your bases in one simple step.

Sounds awesome, doesn’t it? There’s one problem though – there isn’t nearly enough glucosamine in pet food to make a noticeable positive improvement.

A decent amount of glucosamine found in high quality senior dog foods is about 600mg per kilogram. This equates to 60mg per cup of dog food.

For instance your Lab is 80lbs ? After taking the feeding guidelines from a top-quality senior dog food manufacturer, your dog requires about 4-5 cups per day. This averages out to 240mg-300mg of glucosamine consumed by your dog per day.

The problem is that an

80lb Labrador Retriever may need (depending on the quality of glucosamine) anywhere from 800mg-1500mg of glucosamine per day.

While feeding a pet food with built in glucosamine is a great idea, many pet owners feed these products under the assumption the food provides all the glucosamine they need, and never look any further. This is largely due to the fact that manufacturers will use this feature as a major marketing tool when selling their product.

If you have a dog who needs help for his joints due to arthritis or any related condition, then his pet food will simply not give him the amount of glucosamine he needs. Supplementation is always the way to go in these cases, leaving pet owners free to choose their pets’ food based on criteria other than joint health.