Parmesan Cheese, Zinc, & Enzymes

My friend Debbie has 2 adorable Tibetan spaniels. Although they’re adorable, sometimes Max and Buster are picky eaters. Debbie’s solution is to use a sprinkle of parmesan cheese to stimulate appetite. Parmesan may work well because it stimulates a pet’s sense of smell.

Zinc also stimulates the sense of smell, and the ability to smell well is correlated to youth. The opposite, the inability to smell (anosmia), is correlated to aging. This makes me feel that everything we do to help our pets maintain their sense of smell may, in fact, be helping them stay young.

Rather than supplementing with zinc to help your pet maintain its sense of smell, feed digestive enzymes with your pet’s normal meal. Enzymes increase your pet’s ability to absorb zinc from its food. This is better than a zinc supplement, which has the potential of making too much zinc available. Over-supplementing with any substance is harmful. With zinc, over supplementing interferes with your pet’s ability to absorb other minerals, especially copper. Too much zinc weakens the immune system and causes nausea, vomiting, headache, sweating, incoordination, hallucinations and anemia.

There is no chance of over-supplementing if you use enzymes. Enzymes merely make it possible for your pet to absorb the natural ratio of all the minerals, vitamins, fatty acids, proteins, and carbohydrates in the food.

Some products are advertised as enzymes, but they chiefly contain milk sugar. For example, Prozyme, the first ingredient in Prozyme is milk sugar (lactose), not enzymes. Lactose creates problems for pets with milk allergies.

To read more about zinc, and its benefits, visit the University of Maryland Center for Integrative Medicine discussion of zinc: http://www.umm.edu/altmed/ConsSupplements/Zinccs.html

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