06/09/2025
I sometimes get asked why dogs are gaining or unable to gain weight on a fresh food diet.
Dr Conor Brady to the rescue with a far better explanation than I could muster.
It is one of the many reasons I recommend variety. Across proteins, Across brands, Across preparation (cooked, commercial, home made, air dried, freeze dried).
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Why is my dog losing weight on turkey raw dog food?
Because some recipes are too lean (for some types).
Most companies are not analysing their protein/fat contents in any real way. Those tests are pricey and not required by the authorities.
Like the dry food companies, they are using diet formulators like mine to estimate the nutritional content of their products (as did I when I made raw, not pointing fingers here, needs must) and pop that on the label. That's good enough for the vets who are only really concerned for hazardous bacterial content.
However, most of us now know some can take liberty with what they decide to write on that label.
Eg - is your dog crapping bullets after his rabbit meal? !
That's a common one and it's because there's too much bone in there. No way it's 10% bone. Rabbit meat is expensive, the carcass is not.
In other cases, mixes like beef and duck are notoriously fatty. The fattier the beef mince in the shops the cheaper it is as fat is cheaper than muscle.
In the case of duck parts, the cheapest cut you can buy is carcass, which is hella fatty. They try thin this out with necks which are largely bone and you get this paley pinky mix that looks nothing like deep, dark duck meat....because it isn't. The key to it, when I was manufacturing, was adding duck hearts, some liver and maybe some giblets (if you can find some cleaned). That was great meat but as so many are now making raw, there isn't the hearts to go around. There is no other meat on a duck to work with (that they can afford).
Nobody wants to read 20g fat, 10g of protein on the label so there is a tendency of some of the cheaper brands to claim figures approximating 50:50 protein to fat, but a little experience can tell you from 10m away that it's far, far fattier than that.
Fatty raw has a number of issues. Yes your dog will balloon out in weight but also, less discussed, is that most of the actual nutrition - all the minerals, amino acids, antioxidants etc - are in the red muscle bit. The less of that you get the more deficient the diet becomes nutritionally, over time.
But on the flip side, some raws are too lean. I'm looking at you turkey mixes. Many turkey mixes are made on turkey necks. Reason being, a lot of turkey is flown in from Italy or Poland. Folk don't fly in carcasses (or wings really), that goes to the dry pet food factories so they can put images of roasting turkey breast meat on their labels.
Granted there are some turkey farms in the UK but turkey carcass is pretty hard stuff, for a bird, so you need meat to meaty it up a bit. As we mentioned, when it comes to birds, you think hearts and giblets but again, demand is such that those other bits are hard to find (you need LOTS of hearts per 1 turkey neck....) and inevitably, prices soar.
So there's a good chance some turkey raw dog foods are largely ground-up turkey necks. Still GREAT food for a dog, but a touch boney and, as all poultry necks are de-skinned, a very lean cut of meat.
I like a lean raw dog food myself. I know they evolved on lean animals, not this fatty 1:1 fat-to-protein birds we're putting out (a symptom of high-grain diets and no exercise). Those animals would be cheeseburgers in the wild. Wild animals run for a living, literally. Bar babies, most of them start around 4 parts protein to 1 part fat and get far leaner from there.
But I just finished with a client whose ACTIVE dogs were losing weight on turkey complete. She was feeding quite a lot for the size of them. Waste of money. We upped the fat content with some cheap fatty beef mince and boom, overnight, the weight loss stopped, saving her a fortune and the dog from losing any more muscle mass (while they were clearly getting enough protein, the body needed more energy, so it raids the body for first fat and then muscle protein to fuel it).
Everything in proportion.
