Can I give my vitamin D supplement to my poodle?

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Vitamin D in Home-Prepared Diets

While home-prepared diets may show the greatest variation in canine vitamin D levels, Dr. Howell notes that not every home-prepared diet has to be supplemented with vitamin D. “I’ll refer you back to the Tufts study,” she says. “Animals on balanced home-prepared diets may have sufficient D levels. It’s a matter of feeding foods that contain vitamin D, fostering healthy digestion, and possibly supplementing Vitamin D in a whole-food form or in a synthetic form if necessary. I worry that people may over-supplement unknowingly and cause a toxicity in their pet.”

For this reason, she recommends that owners ask their veterinarians for help with homemade diets or turn to Balance IT, a pet diet-planning website developed by a veterinary nutritionist at the University of California, Davis. Dogaware.com is another source of diet-planning information.

“I’m a big believer in animals getting their nutrients from real food,” Dr. Howell says. “Instead of supplementing with a synthetic form of vitamin D3, I think it’s worth getting some fresh foods into the diet that are good sources of D, such as salmon, liver, and eggs. It’s less likely that you will over-supplement if you give a food source of vitamin D rather than cholecalciferol, which is a high-dose synthetic form of vitamin D.

“If an animal with insufficient D levels doesn’t have adequate levels after trying food sources of D, I think it’s worth looking at digestion and then at a synthetic D supplement,” she says. “A conservative amount of synthetic D can bring an animal into the sufficient range. Some popular synthetic vitamin D supplements are from Rx Vitamins and Thorne Research. These products are liquid and easy to dose and administer to your pet. Both are available by prescription and should be monitored by your veterinarian in conjunction with the diet in order to avoid over-supplementation.”