BROCCOLI STALKS FOR YOUR DOG

By © Steve Brown and Beth Taylor

Add Broccoli Stalks to Your Dog’s Food to Help Prevent Cancer.

Eating healthy food is the easiest, most natural way to fight free radicals in your body and to prevent damage from oxidation. Antioxidants are a necessity for every diet – including your dogs and cats!

Broccoli is good for humans and dogs, too! Adding broccoli stalks to your dog’s food will help prevent cancer, the leading disease killer of dogs, and help promote optimum antioxidant activity.

Dogs and cats need fresh vegetables too!

Advertising for dry pet foods shouts at us that we will find everything our animals will need inside that attractive bag with the beautiful pictures of meats, vegetables, and fruits labeled “natural!” This would be great, but it’s impossible. No matter how good the ingredients are in a bag of dog or cat food, it is still a highly processed, grain-based food, lacking in live, whole nutrients.

If we follow the conventional advice, “never feed people food or table scraps to your animals”, our dogs and cats will never eat any of those whole foods we know to be critical for fighting cancer and promoting a healthy immune system: vegetables and fruits in their original forms. This advice is not only out of date -- if we follow it we will be doing direct harm to our dogs and cats. Would we feed our children nothing but dry food in a bag? Dogs and cats are mammals just like us, with the same needs for fresh food.

Even the best of dry pet foods, those that are made out of basic ingredients that are of human-edible quality, are made with synthetic vitamins and minerals. These incomplete, unnatural forms of vitamins and minerals do not provide the level of nutrition required to live a long, healthy life. In addition, the main ingredient in dry food, some form of grain, is not the best food for dogs or cats. Digestion of this highly processed food puts a burden on the body that can be lightened considerably by the addition of some live, whole foods.

Add a little broccoli for almost no cost

For almost no cost and little effort, you can improve the odds that your dog will live a long life. For the most micronutrients for your dollar, juice or finely chop a broccoli stalk to break the cell wall of the plant and make the nutrients more available. The stalk has just as much nutrition as the broccoli flower and is often thrown away. It contains many important cancer-fighting nutrients that can help your dog live longer.

Broccoli stalks, dark green lettuce outer leaves and asparagus spear stalks are good sources of chlorophyll, like all dark green vegetables. Natural chlorophylls exert protective effects against carcinogen exposure in animals and people. Human studies in China show that chlorophyll may help to delay the onset of symptoms of liver cancer caused by mycotoxin-contaminated grains. It is well documented that mycotoxin-contaminated grains have killed many dogs.

Give your animals bright green vegetables like broccoli several times a week. Juiced or chopped very finely, these green vegetables provide cancer fighting and immune system enhancing ingredients that can be found only in fresh foods. In order to keep the proper nutrient balance limit the total amount of the foods you add (unless you add raw bones) to dry food to about 15% by volume for dogs. For cats, a little goes a long way. “Cat grass,” available at natural food stores, is a good addition, or a teaspoon of juiced veggies for medium sized cats.

Broccoli is just one example: there are other good possibilities in the refrigerator of anyone who tries to feed their family a healthy diet that consists mostly of a variety of fresh foods.

They’re grazing on grass: is it bad for them?

If your dog or cat grazes on grass that has not been sprayed with pesticides, herbicides, or other poisons, consider it food (as long as she doesn’t throw up on your carpet!). Foods like grasses contain cellulose, which may not be completely digested (and you may see the grass unchanged in the dog’s feces), but they are of great value in helping to maintain the bacterial balance in the intestines, helping the “good” occupants of the gut to survive. Fresh grass also provides chlorophyll, vitamin C, and hundreds of other antioxidants and enzymes. Do not let your dog or cat eat grass that has been exposed to chemicals. If the grass is in the woods, it is probably “clean”. If the grass is part of a farm or suburban “perfect lawn,” try to prevent your dog from eating it (or walking on it).

In our book, See Spot Live Longer, we give you advice on how to add other important nutrients to your dog’s diet. For little cost of time or money, you can add priceless nutrition and know that you’ll have a much better chance of keeping your Spot around for a long time.

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© Steve Brown and Beth Taylor: We are not veterinarians. The content of this article is for information only. We strongly suggest that you find a veterinarian who is well-informed about whole food diets to help you with your animals. www.seespotlivelonger.com