By Austin Wilson
We do everything with our dogs. We run, play and relax on the couch with our favorite pets. Surely we can share our food with them too, right? That answer is both yes and no. Dogs metabolize food differently than humans. While there are a lot of foods that are fine for your dog to eat, there are plenty of others that are toxic for them.
What Foods Can My Dog Eat?
To keep things simple, I like to put foods into three categories: green light, yellow light, and red light foods.
Green Light Foods
Green light foods are foods that dogs can eat without any real problem. You may even find some of these foods as indigence in the dog food you find in the store. Green light foods include bananas, beans, blueberries, carrots, kiwi, peas, pineapple, pumpkin, raspberries, Rice, strawberries, sweet potatoes, fish, and turkey.
When making your dog’s bowl with these foods, I would recommend 3/4th dog food and 1/4th green light food. While these foods are safe for your dog to eat, feeding them too much may upset their stomach. Especially if it's packaged food since they have additives to increase flavor and may result in vomit or diarrhea. Have fun cleaning that up.
So make sure you're only giving these foods to your dog in moderation or just a as a snack.
Yellow Light Foods
Yellow light foods are foods that you should take extra precautions with. These foods have choking hazards like seeds, cores, and stems. You’ll need to remove these hazards and properly wash these foods before feeding them to your dog. Yellow light foods include apples, bell pepper, cucumber, lemons, oranges, peaches, peanut butter, potato, and watermelon.
Even after taking steps to prepare these foods, I will still recommend you feed your dog in moderation. I would recommend 4/5th of your dog’s food and 1/5th yellow light food.
Red Light Foods
Red light foods are foods that you should NEVER give to your dog. These foods are very toxic and potentially deadly for your dog to consume. Red light foods include alcohol, avacados, cherries, chocolate (especially dark), garlic, grapes, ice cream, milk & dairy, mushrooms, nuts(especially macadamia), onions, pomegranates, and artificial sweeteners.
If your dog eats any of these foods, you should immediately call your vet or the Pet Poison Hotline (855-213-6680) for help.
Meal Enhancers
If you are uncomfortable with giving your dog people food, you can add meal enhancers to their bowl instead. These taste like what we eat (at least to dogs) and are made specifically for dogs to eat. Each brand will have their own meal enhancers to chose from. My dogs favorites are the Simply Nourish meal toppers. I rotate between chicken and beef flavor.