You may sometimes find lists of the top best dog foods for 2019 and most likely feel tempted to feed your dog those foods that rank the highest. Here at Dog Food Reviews, you won’t find a list of the best dog foods for 2018 and neither a list of the best dog foods for 2019. Indeed, you won’t even find the best dog foods for 2017 or any previous years and you won’t find such reviews for the near years to come. Why is that? For a very good reason, and a very important one too: dog food recommendations are not good for all dogs, and they have the potential to do more harm than good.
Those who understand the science of nutrigenomics know for a fact that what is good for one dog may be poison to another.
This is why if you read through the highest ranking food reviews you will find several dog owners reporting that their dog couldn’t seem to tolerate such food. These people are not being party poopers, because here’s an important fact: Every dog is different, and this is often a matter of genes.
Nutrigenomics is the scientific study of the interaction between nutrition and genes. This term has become quite popular nowadays courtesy of Dr. Jean Dodd’s book “Canine Nutrigenomics, the New Science of Feeding Your Dog for Optimum Health.”
According to the science of nutrigenomics, the foods both us and our dogs eat communicate with our cells and control our genes.
We already knew that parents pass down to their children genes that determine whether a child has brown eyes or red hair, and along with those, genes that predispose towards health or disease, but we didn’t know until recently how much quality of diet has the potential to influence genetic expression.
Parents who therefore make unhealthy food choices can influence their children, paving the path towards an unhealthy gene expression, but fortunately, unlike natural eye color or hair color, this can be changed through improved dietary lifestyles.
Individual Reactions to Food
So why does one dog seem to thrive on a certain dog food while in the case of another dog, that same exact food acts almost like a poison?
It’s because some dogs may have a genetic predisposition to develop certain food sensitivities towards certain ingredients. A dog food can be therefore loaded with beneficial ingredients, but those ingredients won’t be able to reach their full potential in the body of a dog that has an intolerance towards them.
We see this often happen among humans too. To a normal child, a packet of peanuts offered during a flight can be a fun form of entertainment and a healthy snack, but give it to a child with a peanut allergy and the child develops hives and facial swelling, or in more severe cases, death through narrowing of the airways from anaphylactic shock.
In the same way, a dog with digestive issues may thrive on a diet of lamb and rice, while another dog may have an intolerance and develop itchy, dull skin. Just as in people, there are individual variances on how the body reacts to certain foods. It’s therefore impossible for a food to be crafted in such a way as to meet the needs of all dogs on this planet and cause all dogs to thrive on it.
With this is mind, it’s redundant to compile a list of the top best dog foods for 2019 or for any given year. Sure, many dogs may thrive on a certain food, but several may not.
There are way too many variances and this is why those dog food reviews out there are a mixed bag of glorious raves and infamous rants. You’ll therefore have the dog owner who swears on the benefits of a certain food, and then you’ll have a dog owner who paid dollars and dollars on vet bills because their dog got sick on it.
On top of that, consider that if you see too many rave reviews, some of those reviews can be biased. Pet food companies may easily hire a bunch of people to post positive reviews so to balance out the negative ones. The tricky part is that you will never know that, considering these fake reviewers astutely post as the average dog owner promoting the food as if it was gold, miraculously solving Rover’s skin issues once and for all.
So does this mean that there is no such thing as the top best dog foods of 2019? It simply means that you must tread with caution before getting too enthusiastic about one food or avoiding another like if it was the plague. For sure, there are dog foods that are far better than others, but the ultimate answer as to how good or bad a food is, ultimately boils down to the individual dog.
“Since each dog has his own genome, a food that benefits one dog might not create the same effect for another-or might even prove harmful.”~Dr. Jean Dodds, Diana Laverdure