Dealing With Dogs With Diabetes: Diabetic Dog Food
Although a lot of people are not aware of it, dogs can get many of the health conditions and diseases that humans do. This includes diabetes, and actually there are quite a significant number of dogs around the world that are presently suffering from the disease. There are in fact two canine diseases that are known as diabetes, which are diabetes mellitus and diabetes insipidus.
Insulin is usually required for diabetes in dogs, but while this is what will help manage the diabetes and keep it under control, you will also need to focus on their diet and exercise regimes.
Diet plays an important role in keeping your pet's diabetes well regulated. This is especially true because insulin requirements change depending on the amount and type of food that is eaten by your pet.
Diabetic Dog Food
There is specially formulated dog food out there known as diabetic dog food, which has been specially designed to provide the essential nutrients and vitamins to dogs suffering from diabetes. Most of the top brands of dog food offer at least a remote selection of diabetic food to choose from, and it is important that you take time to choose the one that is going to be best suited to your dog in particular.
Once you have chosen the diabetic dog food, there are a few things you are going to want to keep in mind. The general recommendation is that your dog should be fed smaller, more frequent meals throughout the day if they are diabetic. This gives their bodies more time to break down the sugars and thereby blood sugar levels are more stabilized.
If you tend to feed them larger, more frequent meals, what typically happens is they will experience a large insulin spike, and then it will drop down significantly as well, and when blood sugar drops too low, it results in hypoglycemia which is a serious condition.
Diet is truly an integral part of the treatment for diabetes, and it is important that you feed a maintenance diet to your dog which is going to meet their individual caloric needs and which varies as little as possible. By feeding your dog diabetic dog food and combining this with plenty of water and exercise, you will be ensuring that their dog will live as long and healthy a life as possible.
Diabetic dog food is important to include in any diabetic dog's diet, and will help not only to manage their condition but make them healthier in general.