Natural Nutrition for Dogs and Cats: The Ultimate Diet Book

Schultze is a popular and well known author known for her "Ultimate Diet" that she teaches in lectures and presentations. Her diet is basically a raw diet that she promotes. Her book instructs pet owners on how to create such a diet. She includes information on food groups and the nutrients they provide.

Schultze recommends "building a prey animal" out of raw ingredients to ensure that your pet gets an optimum mix of nutrients. She argues that dogs (however erroneous) and cats are carnivores and that rather than trying to measure out exact nutrient requirements, it is easier to imagine what they may eat in the wild and emulate their diet to be similar to that. Unfortunately, her instructions are a bit difficult to follow as she describes different ingredients and how to use them - she varies between use them sparingly and use them often, contradicting herself and causing confusion - "Is this a good ingredient or not?"

Schultze relies heavily on the human emotional response to promote her theories. She states that humans should eat a larger variety of fresh foods and attributes that to feeding pets as well. She also argues about lack of vigor in commercial food fed pets and attributes health problems to feeding in such a manner - not taking into account the wide variety of foods that are available commercially and the related variations in quality. The author does not mention any ill effects of feeding raw and the dangers associated with it, only anecdotal potential improvements.

To add to her seeming expertise and experience, the book has forewords by three individuals (two of which are veterinarians) and several testimonials towards the end. These stories do not list the commercial diets the pets were on previous to switching foods and attribute many problems that appeared to improve to the feeding of "The Ultimate Diet" without examining alternate potential causes.

To her credit, the author appears to be a viable source of good information. She is a Certified Clinical Nutritionist and an Animal Health Instructor. The former certification is an achievement in human nutrition which, while not specific to pets, and therefore vastly different, is more formal training than most authors on the topic have.