Episode 49 - Supplements For Raw Fed Dogs and Puppies: Less is More

6/9/2026

This episode is about when and if you should use vitamin and probiotic supplements for raw fed puppies and dogs.

One of my students asked me what supplements were necessary when weaning puppies onto raw. Another student in the same thread said she had read that raw diets are often deficient in vitamins D and E and asked if she should be supplementing those vitamins.

The answers to these questions strike at the heart of what it means to be a raw/natural feeder, and why breeders often struggle with this. Natural feeding is not an ideology, but it does require us to release some deep-seated ideas that are based on presumptions that are not relevant to raw/natural feeders.

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To read the transcript for this episode, click the link below.

Transcript - Episode 49

I'm Jane Messineo Lindquist., and this is a Puppy Culture Potluck podcast. You bring the topics, we bring the conversation.

This episode's question is about using supplements and vitamins when weaning on to raw. And here's the question.

Starting to raw feed our four week old litter of puppies. They've done great with ground turkey and goat milk for two days, and we're ready to decrease the amount of goat milk and add in organ meat, secreting organs and some fruit and vegetables, fermented items and raw, meaty bones.

We will change the protein every week or so. What supplements are needed with weaning to raw?

Okay, me again. Let me just say at the beginning this question came in on the Puppy Culture discussion group. So that's our big discussion group that is open to the public. It did not come in in our Weaning For Life student discussion group.

So this person is not taking our weaning course. So she's not following our exact protocol. However, I think what she describes is a good approach to weaning, even if it's not exactly what we do. And she's asking a valid question. I do cover this all in the weaning course, but I like the question, and I'm taking it because I think it strikes at the heart of what it means to be a natural feeder, and why so many breeders struggle with that.

Plus, spoiler if you are feeding a varied and species appropriate whole food diet, you don't need supplements. If you're a natural feeder and you're reaching for vitamins and supplements, either you're overthinking it, or you've been so conditioned to think of dog food as something highly processed that it's hard for you to comprehend that all the nourishment an animal needs can actually come from food.

I don't routinely use, nor do I recommend supplements, vitamins, or probiotics in pill form for dogs or for puppies. That's not to say that I never use those things, but when I'm reaching for a vitamin or a supplement, it's in a specific context to address a specific problem or situation. So let's just establish at the outset that vitamins and supplements are useful in certain contexts.

But they're not infinitely benign. Meaning to say they can be harmful, they can have positive effects, but they also have costs and negative effects. So they do deserve the same respect that you would give any other medication. Your goal when you're weaning and feeding puppies is to intentionally introduce the maximum variety of whole and fermented foods in a sequence, so that each food is sort of preparing the gut for the next food.

I mean, literally there is a physical thing that happens to the gastrointestinal system. It changes with each new food introduction. So this is how you avoid weaning stress and also how you optimize colonizing the gut biome. You know, we talk a lot about variety being important, but it's more than that. It's also the interplay of different foods that is key to colonizing the puppy's guts.

If you haven't listened to my podcast on food networks, I talk a lot more about this topic there. It's episode 45. I highly recommend you listen to that episode.

Okay, so when we're colonizing our puppy's gut biomes, balance is key because you need room for all the different flora to colonize and network and fill up the gut with beneficial organisms and crowd out the pathogens.

We want the good guys to take up all the room in your puppy's guts, so the bad guys never even have a chance to land. But when you dump an artificially concentrated and narrow band of nutrients or probiotics into those puppies, you disrupt this balance and the effects are not beneficial.

I know somebody is out there looking at their bottle of probiotic pills and saying, oh no, no, no, but this is billions. And look at it's this many. It's 50 different kinds. And if you're thinking that, I encourage you again to go back to episode 45 and not only listen to the podcast, but do go to the show page and look at that food home study, because what they're finding out about foods is that the unidentified nutritional components in food, it's on the order of magnitude of tens of thousands of things that we just don't bother to quantify that do network and do have effects on on our health.

And you're not going to get that in a pill. So we segue our puppies from muscle meat to a commercially prepared barf mix, usually start about three weeks old and they're completely transitioned by six weeks old. So it takes about three weeks and from 3 to 6 weeks old during that same time. We're starting our puppies on fermented vegetables and fermented dairy with fruit, and we're gradually segueing them onto fresh fruits and vegetables.

So again, that three week period when they're three weeks old to six weeks old, that three week period is when we're doing this transition. Our puppy's first vegetable is homemade sauerkraut, and their first fruits are in a homemade double fermented fruit kefir. Why do we do that? Well, remember puppy's first novel, foods meaning to say the first foods that aren't mother's milk would normally be regurgitated food from their mother.

Most domestic dogs have lost that instinct and reflex to regurgitate food for their puppies. Some still do it, but most don't. However. That is how puppies bodies are designed to receive those first novel foods. So those fermented vegetables and fruits are more like what puppies would get in the wild, because that fermenting process sort of pre digests the food in much the same way as the mother's stomach would pre digest the food before she regurgitates it for them.

We also introduce a new food each day. Every day those puppies are with us. So just to clarify, even though we're using a commercial barf mix as our base, we're doing add ons every day. So under those circumstances, puppies are absolutely getting everything they need from their food. Now, if you were feeding a highly processed food, then yes, adding some life back in with supplement and probiotics is better than baseline.

But if you're feeding a raw species appropriate whole food diet, and you're varying that diet and adding something new every day and doing fermented add ons, your baseline is already way above the supplements, and adding those supplements not only is not going to be beneficial, it's actually going to bring your baseline down because it's going to reduce diversity.

So we had some great discussion around this. Here's a good question.

Do you use supplements like vitamin E or D for pups and pregnant dogs that are fed raw, including fresh sardines twice a week and a daily raw egg yolk and a bit of kefir. According to the internet, dogs that are fed raw are often lacking those vitamins.

I'm preparing for our first litter with our maiden Golden and would like to hear your view on this. I have watched the weaning course, loved it and was wondering still about the vitamins and minerals.

And my answer was no, I do not add supplements. You seriously don't need them. If you're feeding a diet as she described, and especially not D and E as they're not water soluble.

And not only toxic if overdosed, but they're teratogenic for pregnant bitches, meaning to say excess of vitamins D or E can cause birth defects in the first trimester. Listen, this whole vitamin thing is a 20th century notion based on our Western transition to highly processed foods with a lack of variety. Again, vitamins can be useful medicine for sick animals or animals with a poor diet.

But not only will those particular vitamins not help your animals, it can really very seriously hurt them. I tagged Magda Chiarella on this one because I wanted to get her input on it too, and she said, I agree with your entire comment. I will add that it's important to distinguish between pasture raised eggs versus eggs from hens that do not forage.

Just as there is a huge distinction between meat derived from foraging animals versus commercially raised. Sardines are caught in the wild and have plenty of fat soluble vitamins. Meat from wild, animals venison, for example, has plenty of vitamin E, while beef raised indoors is seriously lacking vitamin E. It's a whole subject. Suffice it to say, incorporating sardines or any wild caught small to medium fish twice a week and adding pasture raised eggs at least weekly ensures that your dog gets its fat soluble vitamins.

Yeah, Magda’s right. It is a whole topic and I just want to drop it here that not only can vitamin D and E supplements be toxic and teratogens, but foods that are very intense in those vitamins also have to be treated with respect. That is to say, in particular, liver, because too much liver can lead to vitamin A toxicity, particularly as we mentioned in the first trimester.

This can lead to birth defects. So liver in small quantities as you would find in a normal Barf ratio, raw mix, safe. Excellent for your bitch. Good source of vitamin A. But you know, I wouldn't be boiling up a whole piece of beef liver and giving it to her every day that that could be seriously dangerous. Here's another question.

Have you done any posts about ... And then she puts a poop emoji ... I would find it very educational if you talked about the consistency and such through this diet process. That's always a big thing for me when I'm building puppy diets.

She's right. It is a big thing and it's a whole topic in itself. I do spend a lot of time talking about stools in the weaning course.

In fact, when I was making the weaning course, I'm like, wow, this is almost a little weird how much we're talking about stools. But the truth of the matter is that stools are your best indicator to how well the puppies are doing on whatever you're feeding them, and it's really your only way to know for sure if your puppies are tolerating food well.

So what I can say generally about stools and diet is I look for a range of consistency and appearance in the stool, and it depends on what the puppies ate that day and where they are in the weaning process. If I don't like what I see, either I cut something out or I come in with a complementary food to balance things out until I get the picture I want with the stools.

For instance. Oftentimes puppies, when you're doing a lot of training. So usually like, between 6 and 8 weeks old when you're starting to do the communication trinity for real and you're doing leash walking and some socializing, those puppies are probably going to be getting a lot of meat treats. That is to say, treats that don't have any bone in them.

Oftentimes you'll get loose stools from that. So if I have been doing a lot of training and I see loose stools, I'll just come in with a meal that's very high in bone to balance that out. Right. So I'll feed something like a ground chicken frame to to balance out that meat meal, essentially because it is a meal, even though it's coming as a training treat that the puppies got.

So that's just an example of how the stools are going to tell me what's going on inside of my puppies and what I need to feed them.

Here's another comment.

This is so impressive. I don't even feed my children this carefully. I need a simplified version.

You know, this is a great comment and I'm so glad someone said it, because for sure, my own family's diet has changed since I started breeding dogs and seeing the progressive generations, and how being more thoughtful and adding more variety impacted the health and vitality of these animals.

You know, when you have human children, you only get to see 1 or 2 generations, three if you're really lucky. But if you're breeding dogs, you're seeing scores of generations of dogs. So the effects are more obvious and the benefits are more apparent. That having been said, I didn't arrive at the way that I feed my dogs and my family overnight and I definitely am giving you permission to have a goal of better not perfect.

Listen, if you try and change everything, you'll wind up changing nothing because it's too difficult. I remember the first time I read an article about someone fermenting vegetables for their dog. I was ... my mind was blown. It was overwhelming. I couldn't imagine the leap of faith. Of taking vegetables and putting them in a jar with salt water and trusting that they wouldn't rot.

But you know what? I took that little step. I saw the difference in my dogs, and that started me down that path of not being afraid to try taking little steps, doing little improvements, doing tweaks. And here we are today.

So for my closing on this episode, I want to embrace and encourage those of you who have your dogs on a processed food diet. You know, the querent said she needs a simplified version and she doesn't need a simplified version. What she needs is the permission to take it one step at a time. Because it's not complicated. It's complicated if you try and jump in with both feet and change everything you're doing. But trust me on this. It's a very natural path.

You start out with some simple fermented foods, some add ons, and it's just going to become very natural for you. And easy. I mean, back in the day when I started feeding raw, you had to join a co-op and buy a grinder and grind your own food. It was crazy. You know, I used to drive an hour, meet somebody on the turnpike, come home with stinky tripe in my trunk.

I mean, those days are gone. It's easy now. You just buy a barf mix. At least that's your base. That makes it easy. And I'm not ripping the bag of kibble out of your hands, either. I get it, you can do a hybrid. Everybody's allowed play in the sandbox. We're about being better, not perfect.

You can find our weaning course and our breeding course on our website puppyculture.com. And while you're there, check out our puppy course for puppy owners, With Open Arms and a Level Head: How to Welcome a Puppy into Your Life. Also available at puppyculture.com.

We talk a lot about our courses, but don't forget the original film that started it all. Puppy Culture, available at puppyculture.com.

Well, that's it for this time. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.