Vitamins & Minerals Can Be Dangerous for Pets - Iron, Copper, Zinc, & Vitamin CIt's easy to worry that you're not feeding your pet well, but providing a multivitamin can do more harm than good. Vitamins and minerals interact in complex ways, and even multivitamins formulated for pets are not necessarily good for them.
Iron, Copper, & Vitamin C
Let's say your pet is anemic and you want to give it iron and vitamin C to build up red blood cells and correct the anemia. You pick out a multivitamin with iron and vitamin C that advertises to help increase pets' energy and build up the blood. While it's true that vitamin C and iron help build red blood cells, too much vitamin C and iron makes it difficult for your pet to absorb the copper it needs. Copper is just as important for building red blood cells as iron and vitamin C are.
Zinc
Similar problems occur when supplementing with zinc: zinc decreases copper absorption and makes it difficult for your pet to make red blood cells.
To make matters worse, supplementing with iron, zinc, or copper causes chronic liver disease in some dogs. Often this is because dogs have a genetic enzyme deficiency that prevents them from moving minerals out of their body. For these dogs the liver swells as it becomes overwhelmed with copper, iron, and other minerals. These dogs experience liver pain throughout life, and most die at a young age.
More On The Dangers of Supplements To Come
In future blogs, we’ll cover other vitamins and minerals that cause problems when given in supplements. For most dogs, it’s wiser to give whole foods than to give multivitamin and mineral supplements.
No comments:
Post a Comment