Bone Broth For Dogs

I’ll say it right out, in case you are here looking for still MORE support for giving bone broth to your dog: Bone broth is a useless concoction that has no place in a dog’s body. It is a wishful-thinking-driven fad, fueled by the re-packaged, misguided high protein/fat “Keto” and “Carnivore” diets that are currently fashionable for humans.

The claims that are being made about this so-called ‘food’ defy logic, reason and true science. They rely on the same ideas that cause people to strain their kidneys eating 10 times more protein than they actually need every day. Namely, that eating big muscles gives us big muscles, etc. Here’s what nutrition/beauty blogger Kimberly Snyder says about this idea:

“The problem with that logic is that this is simply not part of our body’s natural process at all. Your body is no more likely to take that collagen you are eating and put it in your bones, joints and skin than it is to grow a head of thick lustrous hair for you if you simply eat a big plate of hair every day!”

Let’s start a new fad: Eating eyeballs improves eyesight! Fertility problems? Eat some ovaries! And while we’re following this crazy line of thinking, we’d have to conclude that eating human parts would be much more beneficial than eating, say, cow or pig parts.

If that’s how we think nature works, we’ve way underestimated and misunderstood her, as usual.

You can read the whole article here. Here’s another bone broth debunking article, for those of you who are still reading.

Dog owners in the dark

Note that everything above was NOT written with dogs in mind. There seems not to be a single dog owner on this planet, raw feeding or otherwise, who is willing to think critically about this and many other similar dog food fads. At least that’s what we have to surmise from the avalanche of favorable bone broth articles that comes up when one Googles “bone broth fad for dogs”. The ONLY reference that even contains the word “fad” is one that lists the 5 “myths” of bone broth, #1 among them being that it is a fad.

At least it can truthfully be said that where dogs are concerned, the original food (bones) is actually a normal and natural part of the diet. However, that’s where the good news ends. Bone broth is mostly water, cooked collagen (gelatin), a bit of inorganic (destroyed) mineral matter and fat, unless the latter is cooled and removed.

Are cooked bone PARTICLES any more digestible than whole cooked bones?

Cooking does not improve protein, collagen and other nutritional constituents of bones. Every raw feeder seems to know this. We are frequently cautioned to feed ONLY raw bones and not just because cooked bones are brittle. What fans of both broth don’t seem to realize is that they are also nutritionally worthless.

There’s a REASON why cooked bones are dangerous.  When cooked bones are eaten by a dog, they are NOT dissolved in the stomach acids like raw bones are.  They pass the stomach intact into the intestines where they can cause blockage and perforation.  We all know this, so why on earth are we assuming that PARTICLES of cooked bone have magical healing properties? Or even constitute nutritious food?  They may be too small to block or perforate the intestine, like large bones generally can. But just because they’re small doesn’t mean they are going to be taken in and used by the body.

Dogs cannot get what they need from bone broth. It’s like trying to raise termites on ashes instead of wood. The only thing positive about bone broth is that it’s mostly water. Water is a legitimate natural nutrient for dogs. So here’s how the benefits and disadvantages stack up so far:

1. Water is free, or nearly so. Your dog can get all the water he needs without consuming bone broth.
2. Domestic dogs already get WAY too much fat in their diets and bone broth often contains even more unless it has been removed.
3. Dogs have ZERO need for cooked protein, cooked bone matter or cooked collagen.

A lesson in removal of cause

When people get themselves and their dogs into a health mess and decide that they want to facilitate “natural” healing. Sometimes they opt to feed their dogs nothing but bone broth for a given length of time. They often refer to this as a “fast”, but it is not a fast. Fasting is a very specific thing, and a bone broth diet does not qualify. Nevertheless, as I state in my recent fasting article, this often constitutes removal of cause. That’s because when the dog is eating nothing but bone broth, s/he’s not eating the crap that caused him/her to become diseased in the first place.

A misunderstanding about marrow

Recently I saw someone claiming that the marrow in bone broth is very “powerful.” But I think what this person is confused about is the difference between life and death. While an organism is living, the marrow in the bones IS extremely powerful. All cells are produced in the bone marrow. However, after death, it must be evaluated nutritionally on the same basis as all other parts of an animal’s body. When we do that, we find that bone marrow is mostly fat. And domestic dogs already get way too much of that. The fats in bone marrow are said to be special because they are “anti-inflammatory,” but we have no need to fight inflammation if we’re not causing it! Even if our dogs DO have inflammation, however, we STILL don’t want to fight it or suppress it. We want to understand why it’s happening and remove the cause.

Relative harm

Even though bone broth may share some of the harmful ingredients that commercial pet foods have (cooked proteins, abundant fat, etc.), its only saving grace is that it is EXTREMELY dilute. The same favorable outcomes that are mistakenly attributed to bone broth diets could likely be had by feeding a dog nothing but severely watered down commercial dog food. If you wouldn’t consider buying a can of dog food, adding a few cups of water and pouring it into your dog’s dish, then bone broth shouldn’t be on your radar.

And incidentally, I say positive outcomes are “mistakenly attributed” to bone broth because no food or diet cures anything. When the diet is changed, the body is just no longer being harmed and overburdened by the previous diet, so it can heal itself.

Is bone broth really “mineral rich”?

Nutritionally, bone broth is not worth the trouble it takes to cook it. Almost all the articles you can find extolling the virtues of bone broth just promote the same unsupportable ideas. Primarily, that bone broth is “full of minerals”.  You may be surprised to learn that there is far less mineral matter in a cup of bone broth than in a small serving of kale or 1/4 cup of milk. I’m not saying either of these things is necessarily healthful for dogs, either; I’m just using them as comparison).  Here’s an article written by someone who made bone broth from wild venison bones and grass fed bison and then had the broth analyzed for nutrient content:  Bone Broth Analysis Article.

And bear in mind, the above article was written by someone who was biased IN FAVOR of this ridiculous concoction,.  When these kinds of outcomes are seen in studies by “research scientists”, by the way, they end up in the dust bin, never to be seen again.  That’s why so much “research” seems to favor what industry wants it to.  But back to the topic of “How to Destroy a Perfectly Good Food for Dogs”.

You may need further convincing that bone broth is NOT “rich in minerals.” So, here’s a pdf of a study that was conducted in 1934 by King’s College Hospital in London. It shows the same result:  bone broth is a poor source of minerals.  You’d think in all these years since then, people would have left behind this idea. Putting something in water and destroying it with heat does not make it better, especially where bones are concerned.  Cooked bones have never been eaten by dogs in the entirety of their existence on this planet.  How could a creature adapt the ability to digest something it has never had the opportunity to eat?  Is nature that random and unpredictable?  I don’t think so.

Different foods have different properties

Where dogs are concerned, there is only one class of food that is made better by cooking: vegetables. And it’s easy to understand why.  Vegetables require grinding teeth to break through the cellular membrane and release nutrients. Lacking the proper teeth, amylase would do the job, but dogs don’t have that in abundance either. So, cooking veggies makes them more bioavailable and more appealing to dogs. Dogs will often eat cooked broccoli, for example, but will hardly ever touch raw broccoli. The same goes for yams, sweet potatoes, peas and squashes. It’s still unknown whether dogs actually have need of vegetable matter. We do know that some wild dogs never get the opportunity to eat any kind of plant matter. We also know, however, that domestic dogs that eat vegetable meals (fed separately from meat meals) are typically healthier.

That has more to do with what veggies DON’T contain than what they DO, however. Cooked vegetables aren’t a necessary part of a dog’s diet and cooking definitely destroys nutrients.  It just breaks down cell walls, as well, which makes part of the food more usable.  More info about that can be had in my articles about dogs eating fruit and whether they are carnivores or omnivores.

Older is not necessarily better

Fans of bone broth call the eating of it an “ancient” practice. But that’s not even true for humans, never mind dogs. Truly ancient humans had no desire nor means to cook bones in a pot of water! And the only way a dog ever got cooked meat of any kind would be foraging after a forest fire. This would not happen frequently enough for them to adapt the need for cooked meat.

If it works, don’t fix it

The proper feeding of dogs is simple, easy, cheap and uncomplicated. It has been that way since dogs were domesticated. All we have to do is apply it. We have no need to invent something new when the old way works so well. The more we ignore faddish products and ideas and stick to simple basics, the healthier our dogs will be.