One of the very most important considerations when speaking to the health of your canine and the use of a food or supplement, is the topic of Bio-availability. It is the one factor that has jurisdiction over all nutrients that are ingested and used or not used by your dog’s body or system. The definition of bio-availability is the degree and rate, or ease, with which any nutrient can make its way from the food or supplement your dog eats into their body system. In simpler terms, it is the amount of what your dog takes in that is actually absorbed and used in their body.
All nutrients take the same path or journey through your dog’s body. In the first part of the journey, the food must be digested, or broken apart so that the nutrient can be freed from the food or supplement that contained it. Once the nutrient has broken free, the second part of the journey involves absorption of the nutrient from the digestive tract into rest of the body.
When a nutrient is highly “bio-available,” it can be digested and absorbed a high percentage of the time and in a dependable way. When a nutrient has a low bio-availablity, its digestion, its absorption, or both can be much more difficult and much less predictable. At Canine Health Forward, our goal is to engineer and produce products that are of the highest bio-availability possible. We do this by starting with raw ingredients that allow the highest absorption rates possible then connect them with the correct partners in the body, to complete the absorption process. Often times, a nutrient with a high bio-availability can be paired or surrounded by other nutrients in the wrong amounts or qualities that prevent absorption at a later time in the nutrients journey through the body.
Truthfully most feed and supplement companies will claim they have high bio-availability or absorption rates in their products when in fact they are very low in bio-availability or low absorption rates. More often competitors will use more absorbable raw ingredients yet foster a poor relationship with other nutrients that will in fact work against each other when absorption occurs.
So, always keep in mind that what it all boils down to is the availability of nutrients to be absorbed and what they are surrounded by that directly affects the true bio-availability.