Repeat Something Often Enough And People Stop Questioning It

If you’ve ever sat in front of a TV or walked into a veterinary practice, you’ve heard the pet food marketing.

"Complete and balanced."

Repeated on bags.
Repeated in ads.
Repeated in vet clinics and pet stores.
Repeated so often it has taken on doctrinal significance.

We’ve been conditioned to believe that if a dog’s meal isn’t perfectly "balanced", something terrible is destined to happen - deficiencies and long-term health complications. We are sold the idea that we are incapable of producing nutritious meals for our dogs and the unspoken message underneath it all is this:

Only highly processed food can protect your dog from nutritional imbalance.

Throughout this article, I take a deep dive into this idea with the goal of inspiring you to have the confidence to explore fresh food for your dogs.

A Marketing Term Disguised as a Nutritional Law

Let’s call it what it is.

"Balanced" - at least the way it’s used in the pet food industry - is a marketing term, not a biological law.

It’s been pushed so relentlessly that it’s now repeated almost reflexively, even by well-meaning professionals. Somewhere along the way, it stopped being questioned and started being treated like doctrine. Even veterinary social media influencers routinely belittle those who question the healthiness of processed foods.

When I first started formulating back in 2010, the idea of balanced dog food was one of the first things that stood out to me - not because I had some radical alternative theory, but because any logical person would, at the very least, question it.

But here’s a simple question I’ve often asked people when they bring up the myth of balanced dog food:

When was the last time you ate a "balanced meal?"

Not "pretty good." Not "reasonably healthy." But genuinely balanced - containing every nutrient you could possibly require, in the correct ratios, in one sitting.

Most people wouldn’t even know how to define that for themselves, let alone achieve it consistently. And yet, we’re told dogs must do exactly that. Every meal. Every day. Forever.

Balanced When Exactly?

The uncomfortable truth is that almost no living creature eats a perfectly balanced meal under a regulated standard - not humans, not dogs, not animals in nature.

Nutrition doesn’t work on a per-meal spreadsheet. Nutrition works over time.

Nutrients are stored, recycled, buffered, regulated, and used as needed. The body doesn’t reset to zero every time food hits the bowl. This is where the idea of "balanced over time" matters far more than "balanced per mouthful."

When I first started working with a nutritionist to ensure that my fresh food recipes were "perfectly balanced," my immediate reaction was just how exhausting the process was. There are only so many nutrients you can realistically fit into a kilogram of food, and the constant attempt to force everything into every meal quickly became impractical.

I remember thinking, surely this can’t be the way nutrition is meant to work. And that’s when the same question kept resurfacing - when was the last time I ate a balanced meal myself?

That moment reframed everything.

A broad range of foods, fed in sensible amounts, across days and weeks, is how nutritional needs are realistically met - not by forcing every requirement into a single processed formula.

One aspect that often gets overlooked in discussions about “perfectly balanced” meals is that nutrition isn’t the only biological input dogs need from food. Dogs are hard-wired to use their mouths - to chomp, tear, and apply pressure - and that behaviour exists independently of nutrient spreadsheets. When meals become consistently soft, uniform, and effortless to consume, dogs may still be nutritionally “balanced” on paper, but an important biological outlet is quietly removed.

Feeding over time isn’t just about what goes into the body, but how the body is invited to engage with food in the first place. Chewing and chomping also provide meaningful mental stimulation, activating jaw proprioception and sensory pathways that are linked to calming neurochemical responses, including the release of dopamine and serotonin. In practical terms, using the mouth as it was biologically intended isn’t just physically engaging — it can have a regulating effect on a dog’s nervous system as well.

Balanced on Paper vs Balanced in the Body

There’s a world of difference between what is balanced on paper and what the body can actually absorb, utilise, and assimilate. A nutrient listed on a label isn’t the same as a nutrient being used.

Bioavailability, digestive load, ingredient quality and processing all matter.

A formulation can tick every box on a regulatory checklist and still place unnecessary strain on the body simply because of how heavily processed it is.

Balance on paper doesn’t automatically translate to balance in biology.

If you’re curious about the differences between synthetic and wholefood nutrients - how absorption and utilisation differ, and why this matters more than label claims - check out Inside the Mind of a Formulator: What Makes a Great Dog Supplement.

Why Pet Food Is Supplemented in the First Place (The Bit Everyone Skips)

Here’s the part that rarely makes it into the "complete and balanced" sermon.

Modern commercial pet foods are supplemented with synthetic vitamin and mineral premixes for three very practical reasons.

First: processing reduces nutrients.
High heat, pressure, oxidation, and repeated handling can significantly reduce naturally occurring vitamins and other sensitive compounds. To ensure products still meet minimum nutritional targets after processing, synthetic nutrients are added back in.

Second: consistency matters at scale.
Commercial foods are designed to meet established nutrient profiles batch after batch. Supplementation allows manufacturers to reliably hit those benchmarks regardless of ingredient variability.

Third: cost.
Synthetic premixes are typically far cheaper than wholefood nutrient sources.

There’s also important historical context here. In the early days of commercial pet food, manufacturers didn’t fully understand how processing affected nutrient availability. Deficiencies did occur, and over time, missing nutrients were identified and added back in.

Early nutritional research in the late 19th and early 20th centuries identified clear deficiency diseases in companion animals, including vitamin D–deficiency–related rickets in dogs, highlighting the consequences of inadequate nutrient provision in early manufactured diets.

A later and well-documented parallel emerged in the 1980s, when taurine deficiency in cats fed certain heat-processed commercial foods was linked to serious conditions such as dilated cardiomyopathy and retinal degeneration, ultimately leading to routine taurine supplementation in feline diets.

For a deeper look at how processing, extraction, and nutrient form influence what the body can actually utilise, you can read The Mushroom Blog: Everything You Need to Know About Powders, Extracts and Tinctures.

So when you see a long list of added vitamins and minerals today, it’s not necessarily evidence of nutritional superiority - it’s often an acknowledgement that processing changes food, and nutrients must be engineered back in to compensate.

Which brings us back to the "balanced meal" myth:

"Balanced" often describes what has been reconstructed - not what naturally survived the process.

The "Don’t Add Anything" Paradox

When I was working through the frustrating task of getting the balance of my own fresh food recipes right, the idea that a food could be so perfectly balanced that adding anything else would "ruin" it became something of an internal joke. It was a way to poke fun at balance taken to an extreme - not a position I ever expected to see presented seriously.

That’s why it stopped me in my tracks when I recently encountered marketing that made this claim seriously.

The suggestion was simple: feed one food only, because introducing anything additional would throw the balance off.

At first glance, that sounds reassuring. But when you slow down and follow the logic through, it raises a far more interesting question.

If a food is genuinely well-constructed and nutritionally sound, how fragile can that balance really be?

Does the inclusion of a small amount of fresh meat, a modest increase in natural fat or a simple wholefood addition meaningfully undermine its integrity?

And if it does, what exactly is being "thrown off"?

Is it a slight increase in protein?
A marginal shift in fat intake?
A subtle change in nutrient ratios - the kind the body encounters and regulates every day?

The implication is that balance is so delicate it cannot tolerate real food.

Framed that way, it invites a closer look at how robust that balance truly is - and whether balance should be viewed as a living, adaptive process, rather than a static formula.

The Precision vs Resilience Paradox

The idea that health depends on hitting exact nutritional targets assumes the body behaves like a spreadsheet.

But biological systems don’t operate on perfection.
They operate on adaptation.

Dogs don’t eat identical meals in the wild. Nutrient intake naturally fluctuates from day to day, season to season. The body responds by regulating, compensating, and adjusting.

That’s not a flaw in the system. It is the system.

The paradox is this that the more a feeding approach relies on rigid precision, the less room it leaves for the very mechanisms that keep the body stable under change.

In other words, a diet that only works when nothing changes may not be as robust as it appears.

Raw Food Isn’t the Villain It’s Made Out to Be

There’s a lot of fear-based messaging around raw feeding - particularly when it sits outside the commercial pet food narrative.

Concerns are often framed as absolutes, despite the fact that protein and fat are not foreign substances to dogs. These are nutrients dogs are biologically and evolutionarily equipped to handle, especially when fed in sensible amounts and appropriate contexts.

I also hear, far too often, from people who describe being scolded, shamed, or spoken to as if they are reckless or irresponsible simply for choosing to feed raw or fresh food. In some cases, people are made to feel as though they are actively harming their dogs or "setting them up to die." This approach doesn’t educate - it alienates. And that’s deeply unfortunate, because veterinarians are essential, and there are many situations where their expertise and care are not just helpful, but critical. Losing trust through fear-based communication ultimately serves no one - least of all the dog.

What tends to get lost in the conversation is that nutrition is not binary. Wholefoods, including raw components, exist on a spectrum - and how a dog responds depends on the individual animal, the overall diet, and the broader nutritional picture, not ideology.

What does place unnecessary strain on the body is:

excessive processing
repeated high-heat extrusion
heavy reliance on synthetic premixes
ingredients chosen for shelf stability over nourishment

Balance isn’t just about numbers.

It’s about how much work the body has to do to use what it’s given.

If you’re wondering how supplementation fits into this conversation — even when feeding fresh or whole foods — I explore that perspective further in Why Every Dog Benefits From Supplements | Even If You’re Feeding a Healthy Diet.

The Recall Reality Check

A common theme in online discussions - particularly from high-profile voices - is that fresh or raw feeding is inherently risky, often justified by warnings about contamination, safety, or recalls. Questioning these claims is frequently met with dismissiveness, or a kind of cult-like certainty, where dissent is treated as ignorance rather than curiosity.

But when you step back and look at what actually happens in the real world, it seems largely the other way around.

Week after week, it’s processed and commercially manufactured foods making recall headlines due to issues such as mould, contamination and manufacturing failures.

There’s a subtle but important inversion happening here. Foods promoted as the most controlled, regulated, and safe are, in practice, the ones most frequently pulled from shelves.

That doesn’t mean all processed food will lead to food poisoning, but it does challenge the narrative that processing automatically equals safety or superiority.

It raises the question of whether we’re being encouraged to fear the wrong things.

Another concern often raised is the idea that handling raw food for dogs somehow places families at unusual risk. This argument tends to overlook a simple reality: people handle raw meat in their own kitchens every day. Chicken, beef, lamb, fish - all of it requires basic food-handling hygiene, regardless of whether it’s being prepared for humans or dogs.

The risk isn’t inherent to raw food itself; it’s tied to poor handling practices, which apply equally to human meals. Washing hands, cleaning surfaces, and storing food correctly are standard expectations in any kitchen. Framing raw feeding as uniquely dangerous in this context can feel like a stretch - less about genuine risk, and more about reinforcing fear around a feeding approach that sits outside the commercial norm.

This idea of questioning dominant narratives comes up again in Canine Pancreatitis: Have We Been Looking At It the Wrong Way?, where I look at how fear, framing, and oversimplification can shape how we interpret dietary risk.

Convenience Was Always the Selling Point

Commercial pet food didn’t rise to dominance because it was philosophically superior - it rose because it was marketed as convenient, cheap, shelf-stable, portioned, predictable, and easy for busy people to use.

And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Convenience matters in the real world.

The problem starts when convenience is reframed as nutritional perfection, and when questioning that framing is treated as irresponsible. What solves a short-term human problem - time, storage, consistency - isn’t automatically the best long-term nutritional strategy.

Balance, once again, comes down to context.

Convenience can be useful. It just shouldn’t be mistaken for gospel.

The quieter fallout of this shift is cultural rather than nutritional. Over time, people have been conditioned away from trusting themselves to the point where feeding real food now feels risky, irresponsible, or reckless. Many are genuinely afraid to offer even simple table scraps - not because they’re unsafe, but because confidence has been eroded.

That distance from how food has always been shared - cautiously, imperfectly, and with common sense, is arguably the most tragic outcome of all.

Patterns Worth Questioning

From my perspective - and this is a view shared by many respected veterinarians and nutrition-focused professionals around the world - it’s difficult not to notice a recurring pattern. Many modern diseases appear alongside increasingly processed diets, not just in dogs, but across species. Two dogs with the same genetics can have very different outcomes depending on diet, not to mention lifestyle.

That doesn’t mean processing automatically causes disease - biology is never that simple - but it does raise reasonable questions about long-term dietary burden.

What I don’t see discussed with the same concern are fresh or minimally processed foods, where ingredients more closely resemble what the body is designed to recognise and work with.

At its core, this isn’t rocket science. What you put in, you get out. At the very least, that contrast deserves curiosity rather than dismissal.

For another practical example of how diet affects real-world physiology - not theory - you can read The Truth About Dog Anal Glands: Why Your Dog’s Poo Matters.

Final Thought

Dogs absolutely have nutritional requirements - that part isn’t up for debate.

But the idea that every meal must be perfectly balanced, only processed food can achieve this and that any deviation is dangerous, is more mythology than biology.

True nutritional resilience comes from broad, thoughtful input over time - not from fear-based restriction. Balance isn’t something that collapses the moment you step outside a bag or a can.

If nutrition really worked the way marketing suggests, most humans would be in serious trouble much earlier in life.

Dogs deserve better than slogans. They deserve context, common sense, and an understanding that the body is far more adaptable and intelligent than a label implies.

Balance isn’t about control. It’s about perspective.