Nutrition starts with knowledge.

What is a natural wet diet?

Natural wet diets are made from whole ingredients like meat, organ meats and vegetables, then cooked to make them safe to eat. Compared with extruded dry food (kibble), they have:

• More moisture
• Less intensive processing
• Ingredients you can recognize
• Great taste for most dogs

Digestibility

Digestibility is the most studied benefit of cooked wet diets. In controlled feeding trials, dogs digested protein, fat and energy more efficiently on cooked wet diets than on extruded kibble, and they produced less stool.

• Do et al. (2021) compared human-grade fresh diets with an extruded diet. Dogs on the fresh diets had higher digestibility and much lower fecal output.
• Algya et al. (2018) found that mildly cooked and raw diets were more digestible than an extruded diet, with lower fecal output.
• Cai et al. (2022) is closest to how Wow Can is made. It found that fully sterilized (autoclaved) food did not lose digestibility. Protein and fat digestibility were higher than in the extruded diet.

Skin and coat

Skin and coat are a window into nutrition. High-quality protein and essential fatty acids, like the omega-3s in flaxseed and fish oil, help support healthy skin and a shiny coat. That's nutritional support, not treatment for skin disease. If your dog has a skin condition, see your veterinarian.

Cooked vs. raw (BARF)

Raw diets and cooked wet diets share a goal: less industrial processing. They differ a lot on safety and nutritional control.

• Food safety: raw diets can carry bacteria that affect both pets and people. Wow Can is cooked in a sealed pouch, which eliminates pathogens. Research like Cai et al. (2022) shows this doesn't have to cost digestibility.
• Nutritional control: cooked recipes allow precise control of key minerals like calcium and phosphorus, which can be hard to balance in homemade raw diets.

Our approach

This page summarizes published research on dogs and general principles of canine nutrition. The studies above looked at categories of diets, not Wow Can specifically. We use their findings to guide how we cook and formulate our recipes.

References

1. Algya KM, Cross TL, Leuck KN, et al. Apparent total-tract macronutrient digestibility, serum chemistry, urinalysis, and fecal characteristics, metabolites and microbiota of adult dogs fed extruded, mildly cooked, and raw diets. J Anim Sci. 2018;96(9):3670–3683.
2. Do S, Phungviwatnikul T, de Godoy MRC, Swanson KS. Nutrient digestibility and fecal characteristics, microbiota, and metabolites in dogs fed human-grade foods. J Anim Sci. 2021;99(2):skab028.
3. Cai X, et al. The influence of food processing methods on serum parameters, apparent total-tract macronutrient digestibility, fecal microbiota and SCFA content in adult beagles. PLOS ONE. 2022;17(1):e0262284.