Homemade dog food calculator

How much homemade food should I feed my dog?

Feed by calories, not by volume. Work out how many calories your dog needs in a day, work out how many calories each gram of your recipe contains, and divide one by the other.

Grams per day = daily calories ÷ (calories in the batch ÷ weight of the batch in grams)

The daily calories come from the same formula vets use for commercial food: 70 × weight in kg^0.75 for resting needs, multiplied by a factor for life stage, neutering, activity and body condition. If your vet or nutritionist has given you a calorie target, choose "My vet's number" and use theirs instead.

Worked example: a 30 lb neutered adult that gets a few walks a day needs about 952 kcal. The example batch in the calculator (2,000 g chicken breast, roasted, 500 g carrots, boiled, 500 g green beans, boiled) weighs 3,000 g and contains 3,650 kcal, or 122 kcal per 100 g. So the dog needs 783 g (27.6 oz) a day, 391 g per meal, and the batch lasts about 3.8 days. That example is only there to show the maths; it is not a balanced diet.

How do I work out the calories in a homemade recipe?

A good recipe states its calories, but in the UC Davis review 85% of published recipes did not give calorie information or say what size of dog they were for. If yours doesn't, add the ingredients up yourself:

1. Weigh each ingredient in the state you'll use it, cooked or raw.
2. Look up its calories per 100 g in that same state in USDA FoodData Central. Cooking changes the number: meat loses water and gets more calorie-dense per gram.
3. Enter both numbers for every ingredient, including oils, which are very calorie-dense.

Why homemade portions look so big

Home-cooked food contains a lot of water, so it carries fewer calories per gram than dry kibble. The example recipe has about 122 kcal per 100 g, while a kibble with 3,600 kcal per kg has 360. The same 30 lb dog would need about 265 g of that kibble but 783 g of the homemade mix. A bigger bowl is normal; judge the amount by your dog's weight and body condition over the following weeks, not by how full the bowl looks.

Why most homemade dog food recipes fall short

Getting the calories right is the easy part. In what was thought to be the largest review of its kind, veterinary nutritionists at UC Davis analyzed 200 recipes from 34 sources, including veterinary textbooks, pet care books and websites. Their findings, published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association in 2013:

• 95% of recipes were short of at least one essential nutrient, and more than 83% had several deficiencies.
• Only 9 of the 200 met AAFCO's minimum standards for adult dogs.
• 92% had vague or incomplete instructions, leaving owners to guess at ingredients, cooking or supplements.

The gaps that worried the researchers most were choline, vitamin D, zinc and vitamin E, which can lead to immune problems, fat build-up in the liver and musculoskeletal abnormalities when fed long term. The Merck Veterinary Manual adds that many home-cooked diets end up high in protein and calories.

Supplements and getting expert help

Ask for the exact vitamin and mineral supplement, and the amount, as part of the recipe rather than adding a general multivitamin. Guessing is risky in both directions: too little leaves gaps, and some vitamins and minerals cause harm in excess. The researchers' advice was to skip general recipes from books and the internet and have a board-certified veterinary nutritionist formulate one for your dog. In their review, all four recipes written by such specialists met the standards for adult dogs.

Treats still count. The UC Davis nutrition service recommends keeping treats and extras under 10% of daily calories even for dogs on a home-cooked diet, so the balanced recipe supplies at least 90%. The dog treat calculator shows what that allowance looks like. For raw recipes, use the raw dog food calculator instead.