Why you should make sure your dog gets their daily dose of probiotics
- To make sure that you get ‘pickup-able poo’
- To help protect them against harmful bacteria, such as E. Coli and Salmonella
- To help with problems, such as irritable bowel syndrome, collitis and diarrhoea
- To improve immunity
- To help with allergies To improve skin and coat condition
- To ensure you dog absorbs the nutrients from their food
- To help with behavioural issues
- To help keep your dog as happy and healthy as can be
How can one thing do so much?
The long list of what a probiotic can do makes them seem like a miracle cure. Although some people think they are this is not the case. What probiotics do is get the digestive system working optimally and this has many knock on effects. For example, probiotics do not directly improve skin and coat, what they do is help the digesting of food. When food is digested it is broken up into individual nutrients, such as omega 3 or zinc, which are good for skin and coat. It is the omega 3 and zinc that improve skin and coat quality, but your dog needs the probiotic to break food down into nutrients including omega 3 and zinc, so that it can get to the skin and coat. Without feeding a probiotic for dogs you can end up feeding your dog a lot of beneficial nutrients and having them come out the other end, instead of being absorbed.
What is the difference between a probiotic and a prebiotic?
The goal of consuming both probiotics and prebiotics is to improve the number of good bacteria in the gut, to help digestion (and importantly the ratio of good bacteria to bad bacteria). Probiotics are the bacteria themselves, so adding them directly increases the number of good bacteria. Prebiotics are essentially food for the good bacteria, so adding prebiotics enables the probiotics to thrive and increase in number. We recommend using products such as the Bionic Biotic supplement, or Pooch & Mutt’s grain-free dog food, which combine both probiotics and prebiotics.
