Canine Nutrition: And Performance, Medical Issues, Lifestages, Ethical Considerations, and More

Energy

Nutrition and Performance

Maximizing Performance

(originally appeared in the AKC Gazette, March 2000)

When it comes to canine athletes, the saying You are what you eat is like a nutritional commandment that has gone on a diet: It leaves out an essential ingredient. To receive maximum benefit from dietary components, you must first be conditioned to use those components, whether you’re a canine or a human. The expression should go on to say and how you compete, to account for the differing demands of short-term burst sports and long-term endurance sports.

Begin at the Beginning

Before you can decide on a nutrition program for your canine competitor, you have to have a plan of campaign. First, what sport or sports interest you? Some people concentrate on one activity only, while others take part in a variety. A few typical scenarios could include: conformation and lure coursing year round; field trials and actual hunting during a four- to six-month season; obedience year round; sled-dog racing during a three- to four-month season; hearding year round, plus agility in spring and fall.

Of course, many other possible permutations exist. What you have to consider is the intensity and duration of your chosen activity, and your competition season. We will talk about physical and mental conditioning in depth in a future issue, but training is actually also part of your nutritional program. You can’t just decide to start feeding the latest fad diet two or three days before a big event and expect a great performance. You not only won’t get a great performance, you’re likely to suffer a total screw-up. The body needs time and training for efficient utilization of a dietary formulation.

Robert L. Gillette, DVM, MSE, past president of the American Canine Sports Medicine Association and senior research fellow at the Scott-Ritchey Research Center, College of Veterinary Medicine, Auburn University, has been working to achieve better performance with field trial dogs. One detail he stresses is preseason preparation. At least six weeks prior to the season, you should begin working the dog out. So let’s say eight weeks before the season, you take a week to change to the performance diet, and a week to start adapting the dog to working out. By the beginning of the season, the dog’s been working and eating a full performance-type diet for at least six weeks. You’ve trained the body to the point where it can perform. Now the conditioning is maintaining the dog at a performing level.

The Canine Components

In the proceedings of the sixth annual Sports Medicine program, Gillette’s Getting the Most Out of Your Canine Athlete points out the interrelatedness of the various parts of the dog. The body systems involved in performance are the muscular, skeletal, nervous, cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal, renal, hormonal and skin. Every athletic event includes some form of movement. Movement is a result of the muscles moving bones according to neuronal stimulation. The other systems work together to provide or maintain the components needed to allow this function. Muscles are used in propulsion and navigation. The skeleton provides support and structure to the body. The nervous system provides stimulation, balance and direction. The cardiovascular system provides energy to the cells and removes the energy byproducts. The respiratory system provides gaseous exchange and thermoregulation. The gastrointestinal tract produces energy and removes waste. The hormones act to maintain balanced metabolism. The skin provides a protective covering from the environment, an outer membrane to the internal orders, and is responsible for optimal coat. Peak performance of the body as a whole is a result of the optimal, balanced output of these systems.

Just as humans and apes have a metabolic quirk of not being able to generate vitamin C, dogs have their metabolic uniqueness. They are set up for an endurance performance, relying far more on oxidative metabolism than any other animal. What does that mean, exactly? Whereas pretty animals rely on speed to escape, and feline predators rely on short, fast pursuit to catch prey, canines rely on wearing the prey down. While wolf packs often pursue large prey in relays, using fresh sets of legs, even an individual wolf (or dog) uses endurance to run down a rabbit.

To fuel this different survival strategy, the canine developed a highly versatile and efficient oxidative metabolism. Like most other mammals, the dog relies on other energy systems first. The first 15 seconds or so use a one-enzyme system, and the next mine and a half or so of energy comes from anaerobic breakdown of glucose. After two minutes of physical exercise, oxidative metabolism takes over.

Many of the canine sports performances take less than two minutes to accomplish. Agility would certainly be a good example. But do you simply yank the dog out of a crate and onto the course? Probably not. As M. Christine Zink, DVM, Ph.D., points out in her book Peak Performance, Exercise should always include some warm-up stretching exercises. It has been shown that muscular contraction is improved 20 percent by increasing the body temperature by 2 degrees Fahrenheit. The reserve is also true. Muscular contraction decreases significantly in the cold. A warm-up helps the blood vessels open up and supply blood to the muscles and nerves and also helps stretch the ligaments and tendons so that injury is less likely to occur. A good stretch loosens the muscles of the limbs and spinal cord and lines up the bones of the joints in preparation for exercise. So if you do almost any sort of warm-up you are already two minutes into exercise – and using oxidative metabolism – by the time you being the actual event.

Zink correctly points out that, aside from ,ushing and herding (and field trials), Most of the other performance events that our dogs participate in, such as obedience, agility, lure coursing, flyball, and so on, are spring activities, and so these dogs have less rigid nutritional requirements. But all can benefit from a nutritional strategy oriented toward top performance and effective recovery.

Performance Dogs

In working with Labrador Retrievers, Pointers and coonhounds in the field, Gillette has demonstrated that the key is delaying fatigue. How does fatigue come up? Well, that’s when your muscle glycogen is depleted. So you want to make sure that muscle glycogen is at as high a level as we can get it, and maintain that level, before we run out of energy. And by conditioning a dog to operate on fatty metabolism, we delay fatigue.

Currently in the middle of a dietary study, Gillette is seeing benefits from using a base diet that is 23 percent fat. He particularly recommends a food with 20 percent fat, supplemented each time you feed with a tablespoon or two of safflower oil. That way, you’re increasing the fat content to about 23 percent, and you’re supplementing vitamin E. Because vitamin E stabilizes cell membranes, Gillette feels that it is particularly important for maximum performance, acutely so for dogs using their scenting abilities, such as pointing breeds and search-and-rescue dogs. Thiamine is also helpful in minimizing the effects of stress. But Gillette is careful to emphasize that the key to this is that these dogs are on conditioning programs. If they’re not, and it’s just a dog that’s lying around, it doesn’t really make any different what you feed.

Hilary Watson, an exhibitor and graduate student researching the nutritional requirements of dogs with chronic renal failure, agrees that fat is where it’s at. She notes that the human diet theory of carbo loading does not work for dogs. On the other hand, says Watson, High fat intake, combined with endurance training, causes cardiovascular, pulmonary and enzymatic changes that enhance the storage of fat in muscle and increase an animal’s ability to use fatty acids as fuel for muscle activity. This process is known as fat adaptation. Treadmill studies with Beagles have shown that feeding high-fat diets results in a longer period before a state of exhaustion.

Side Effects of High-Fat Diets

Mention high-fat diets and a lot of people think immediately of pancreatitis. Yet sled dogs routinely fed diets as much as 60 percent fat, do not seem to suffer this malady. Gillette hypothesizes that dogs allowed to adjust to such a diet avoid problems. Pancreatitis usually comes from a dog that engorges itself on something. I believe the reason we don’t see pancreatitis in sled dogs is that they are conditioned to it; furthermore, we’re not seeing pancreatitis in these 23 percent fat diet dogs.

So what would seem to be a detrimental side effect does not occur in real life. But a beneficial side effect does. A byproduct of fat metabolism is water. If you metabolize 100 grams of protein, you get 40 grams of water as a result. For 100 grams of carbohydrate you get 55grams of water. But in metabolizing 100 grams of fat, you get 107 grams of metabolic water. You actually help to rehydrate the dog just by having him burn fat rather than carbohydrate or protein.

This in itself is a major benefit, but there is yet another side effect. Some dogs, particularly Labs, suffer from Exercise Induced Hyperthermia (EIH), which can be a genetic predisposition or diet-related. Dogs that suffer from it shoot their temperature from a normal of 100 degrees to 106 or 107. They weaken, and may even collapse. For some of these dogs, the rehydration effect of a fat-based diet appears to help keep their body temperature down.

A Feeding Plan

When asked to provide guidelines for a nutritional conditioning program, Gillette requested a hypothetical case. So the following plan was devised for a Pointer competing on weekends in three-hour field trials. But it would also work for other canine weekend competitors in other dog sports.

First, you need to acclimate the dog to working out and consuming a performance diet. As described previously, this begins eight weeks prior to the start of competition. Start mixing your high-fat diet with your off-season diet, increasing the percentage of the high-fat diet until, after a week and a half or so, you are feeding only the high-fat diet. At the same time, slowly start working the dog out. By the time the season arrives, the dog’s body will be conditioned to metabolize the high-fat diet and perform.

If our Pointer is competing Saturday morning, we’ll feed him his usual Friday evening meal. If his competition isn’t until the afternoon and we can feed him at least six hours before that, Gillette recommends a meal Saturday morning. That way, he’s got food in him, but I’ve got a six-hour window where I want to make sure he doesn’t get anything because the body just can’t break it down fast enough.

But there are two things you do want to provide closer to your performance. The first is water – a little, not a whole bowl, for fear of having a full stomach that could flip during exercise. The second is a glucose protein supplement given 10 to 15 minutes before the start of performance. We’re working on that supplement right now, says Gillette, and so far the results look great.

If you were simply hunting on your own, you would continue to give the supplement every half hour to hour, but in trial circumstances, the dog will now have to compete on his own. Gillette’s studies thus far have shown an extra half hour of effective performance with use of the supplement.

Within a half hour to an hour after the end of the performance, the glucose protein supplement is given again. If you feed him at that time, the body systems that are depleted are like a sponge and they suck up everything that’s needed. So the energy that is taken in at that times goes exactly to the spot that it was used up. If you wait more than two hours, those energy sites have already depleted resources out of the body. Then the food that goes in goes to different storage sites and not really where it’s needed.

Saturday evening the dog gets his normal 23 percent fat meal. Sunday he is competing in the finals, and again gets his pre- and post-performance supplement. After winning, our Pointer gets a Sunday evening recovery meal of more carbohydrate/protein than his usual high-fat diet. On Monday, he gets his supplement before a light workout and goes back to his high-fat diet that evening. We continue conditioning with workouts, supplements and the high-fat diet all week before gearing up again for another weekend.

High-fat diets and judicious use of supplements are promising, indeed, showing not just heightened performance but a lower incidence of injuries. And injuries are one of the major problems with performing every week.

Feeding for High Performance

(Originally published in Dogs in Canada, April 2008)

There’s more to it than simply switching to a higher-fat diet.

While many of us keep dogs simply as companions, or take part in various dog sports on an occasional basis, some are devoted to more intense forms of competition. Dogs that spend hours training for, and competing or working at, field trials, sled dog racing, search and rescue are elite athletes requiring nutrition geared to their lifestyle.

Simply being alive requires energy – to keep blood delivering oxygen to tissues, to maintain body temperature, to grow hair, to replace dead cells, to keep the brain ticking over. Exercise, of course, increases energy demands. Sustained exercise requires even more of the body, burning nutrients for activity while still supplying all the basic needs.

At the October 2007 Canine Health Foundation conference in St. Lous, Mo., Brian Zanghi, Ph.D., spoke on optimal nutrition for the exercising dog. He emphasized that the body adapts to changing levels of proportions of nutrients, and that the incredible endurance of sled dogs is gained primarily through diet rather than genetics. Proper nutrition to support the increased metabolic demand of exercise is critical in ensuring that performance is optimized for a dog to reach its own highest potential, says Zanghi.

The body can use different nutrients as fuel for exercise. As the demands on metabolism increase with exercise, more calorie-dense nutrients are required, so protein becomes preferable to carbohydrates, and fat becomes preferable to carbohydrates, and fat becomes preferable to protein. Relying primarily on metabolism of fat for exercise assists the body in reserving blood glucose to maintain brain function, thus increasing mental stamina.

The physiological changes that occur when a dog is conditioned to utilize a high-fat, high-protein diet result in increased maximal oxygen metabolism, boosting natural metabolic endurance. Examined under a microscope, the muscles of dogs conditioned to a high-fat diet show a definite increase in the number of mitochondria. These are the actual fat-burning energy-producing cell components, so an increase in their numbers translates into more energy, better stamina, and more-efficient oxygen utilization. However, the greater oxygen demand of strenuous exercise combined with metabolism of fat also results in greater quantities of oxygen (free) radicals. The body also needs some time to accomplish the metabolic change necessary to burn fat efficiently. So there’s more to it than simply switching to a higher-fat diet.

High-Fat Benefits

First, that adjustment period. Some experienced competitors switch from their performance diet in the off-season, correctly figuring that their dogs require fewer calories when not working as hard. They’re right about the decreased caloric need, but may not realize that their dogs will take weeks or even months to regain maximal endurance when put back onto their high-performance diet. Zanghi suggests that a better strategy is to continue to use the same diet year-round, simply feeding less in the off-season.

In fact, the adjustment to utilizing a high-fat diet offers so much potential the VO2 max (the maximum possible utilization of oxygen during exercise) in ordinary non-performance dogs conditioned to eat a high-fat diet equaled the VO2 max of highly conditioned performance dogs. It seems uncontestable that high levels of fat in the diet can lead to higher energy levels, greater endurance and better performance.

Fat has the added benefit of being a source of metabolic water. Working dogs lose enormous amounts of water. Approximately six percent of every exhaled breath is water (whether in cold weather, when the air tends to be very dry, or in warm weather that causes dogs to pant more). Working dogs can’t drink large volumes of water or they risk bloat. So increased metabolic water – 107 grams of water for every 100 grams of fat metabolized compared to only 40 grams or water per 100 grams of protein – provides a substantial hydration boost.

The origin of the