Can I give my dog beets?

Beets are a healthy food that some people crave, while others turn their nose up at them. In any case, since humans can nutritionally benefit from consuming beetroot why couldn’t a pet dog also partake?

We need to distinguish between beets not causing harm to actually being beneficial. Is it worth the time and expense of giving your dog some beets along with their dog food, or as part of a raw diet?

The truth is that it won’t hurt your dog to chow down on a beet every now and then, but at the same time it’s not going to really help them out much as it can for humans.

Can I Give My Dog Some Beets? Answer: Not Necessary

If you’ve got some leftover beets that you couldn’t finish and they’ve been eyeing your plate in hopes of some scraps, there’s no harm in it.

Video: Can Dogs Eat Beets?

However, you don’t need to make it a point to give them beets for health reasons.

We often hear, in the news or read an article, about a particular food that was recently found to have new potential health benefits. Now beets are being touted as a sleeper superfood. Many health sites are recommending adding them to your diet but this doesn’t apply to dogs.

You canine will be doing quite fine as long as they’re getting a quality dog food each day. It may seem boring to us, and we wouldn’t want to eat the same thing each day. But dogs eat to live, and they don’t need a lot of bells and whistles in the food department.

Beets aren’t known to cause problems for dogs. Regardless, the reason why you don’t need to give your dog beets is that it really won’t do anything for them. Not all foods that are healthy for humans translate to the canine species, and beets are not something that they can’t live without. They wouldn’t go digging them up in the wild, so there’s no need for you to intervene and introduce them into their diet.

Video: Beet Dip - You Suck at Cooking (episode 39)

Dog Food Filler

Many dog food companies out there put all sorts of things in dog food to drive the price down and drive profits up. They know that if they put human foods in dog food that owners recognize as being healthy, they will be more apt to think that the dog food is of top quality and is good for their dogs.

Video: Dropping Beets With David Guetta and Calvin Harris

But the reality is that all of these vegetables and grains that show up at the top of the ingredients list in low-grade dog foods are just fillers, and while they don’t really hurt your dog, they don’t do it any favors either.

Wolves and Beets

If you try to picture a wolf making a meal out of some beets you will see that it doesn’t really make sense to give them to your dog. They’ve got sharp teeth that are ready to tear some meat up. You’re not going to undo millions of years of evolution by feeding your dog beets and thinking that they’ll adapt to a more vegetarian lifestyle.

In fact, what you’re doing is disrupting their natural state of well-being. This is akin to giving a cow, a natural vegetarian, meat fillers which ended up leading to mad cow disease. While you probably won’t drive your dog mad, you definitely are going against what they’re craving, and what their body processes naturally.

Dogs and Supplementation

The best news is that if you simply give your dog a high-quality dog food you don’t need to worry about giving them anything else. These premium-grade foods are formulated so that they mimic what a dog would be eating in the wild, and will have an animal protein listed as the first and most abundant ingredient.

This means that you should start to see a marked improvement in your dog’s energy level, the shininess of their coat, and their overall health and activity level. When a dog is getting all of the good stuff they need, the rest seems to take care of itself.

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