It can be confusing knowing what is a healthy diet for dogs. Especially if you want to ensure your dog gets a balanced diet. This dog nutrition guide covers the basic nutrients in the fat and carbohydrate category, that your dog needs to get. And how much of the diet they should compose. So if you prefer to mix up your own dog food, instead of relying on a poor quality or expensive commercial variety, then these dog nutrition tips will help.

Animal Fats

As with humans, the right type of fats are important for good dog nutrition. Fats from pigs (lard), and horse fat contain essential fatty acids that beef tallow and mutton don't. For this reason, beef tallow and mutton should not make up a large part of your dog's energy source. Fats are the same calorie for calorie, but the nutritional content is quite different. Animal fats have about 126 calories in every tablespoon.

Cereal Grains

Cereal grain products should not make up more than 50% of the dry food in a healthy diet for dogs. Sources of cereal grains include both dry and cooked breakfast cereals, corn meal, hominy grits, and milled grains like flour. Grains are a source of carbohydrates, and they contain about 29 calories per tablespoon, or 464 calories per cup.

Potatoes

Potatoes are a carbohydrate and source of starch. They can be used interchangeably with cereal grains as part of your dog's diet, but their total should be part of the total for all cereal grains, not a separate consideration. Potatoes have more water in them than cereal grains. Consider them the equivalent of grains fed in the boiled state when designing your dog's diet.

Bread

Another carbohydrate, bread is considered to be one of the better non-commercial foods to be part of the dog's diet. This is because even white bread is usually fortified with vitamins and minerals. So if you're choosing to make bread a part of your dog nutrition mix, choose one with this caveat in mind. The advantage in using bread as part of the carbohydrate mix is it's ease of use. And some people prefer to toast it first. Whilst this does not increase it's bioavailability (the starches in bread are already cooked), it does make it easier to crumble into the dog food.

Specialty Flour Products

These can be quite advantageous for the owner in terms of preparing the dry food ahead of time. Products like flour noodles, macaroni, and spaghetti (not the tinned variety!!) can be added to the dry food, stored away, then cooked in small amounts when needed. Thus you can mix a large amount of dry food all at once. The energy content of these products is comparable to other carbohydrates.