Hannah Zulueta Feeding Philosophy
So Much Competing Information
What a sweet potato taught me about belief systems, ancient texts, and the comment section
A devoted dog owner stood in her kitchen afraid of a root vegetable. Not because her dog reacted to it. Because a Facebook group told her to be. This article is about how we got here, and how to get out.
The One Thing
It is OK to question how you feed your dog
Questioning is how the whole field of knowledge moves forward. It always has been. The oldest medical texts we have are two thousand years of doctors arguing with each other in print. The newest science works the same way. The only place where a position is expected to hold still forever is a comment section.
Where This Started
A client and a sweet potato
Today a client asked me about root vegetables. I told her I am not afraid of sweet potato and I use it in many of the recipes I write. Not every recipe, because every recipe is tailored to the dog in front of me, but many. She went quiet for a second. She had read in a Facebook group that sweet potato was bad for dogs. A few weeks earlier, a different client asked me whether sweet potato was safe to feed all the time. Same vegetable, same worry, same source. When I asked the first client what she actually believed, she gave me the honest answer.
“I just don’t know what to think. There’s so much competing information.”
She loves her dog enough to hire a nutritionist, and she is afraid of a sweet potato. Her dog has never reacted to one. The fear came from strangers in a comment section.
Here is my data. I have fed sweet potato for years. The dogs who come to me are already sick. They arrive with kidney disease, reflux, chronic diarrhea, pancreatitis histories, skin that will not settle. They get better on recipes that run 20 to 30 percent plants. Reliably enough that I stopped treating it as an open question a long time ago. If you came here for that answer specifically, I laid out the whole case, including the one legitimate caveat, in is sweet potato bad for dogs.
This article is about the other thing. Not the vegetable. The reason a woman who loves her dog is standing in her kitchen afraid of one.
The Older Way of Arguing
The doctors wrote their arguments in the margins
People assume ancient medicine means frozen dogma. Do it the way it has always been done. The texts say otherwise.
Open the Shang Han Lun, the Su Wen, the Huang Di Nei Jing. These books are around two thousand years old, and they do not present a single voice. They print the original text, and then, layered underneath, centuries of commentary. Doctors disagreeing with each other. Doctors disagreeing with the original author. A physician in one dynasty writing, in effect, this line worked in my clinic and this one did not, and here is what I did instead.
The debate got loudest at the worst times. After a plague or a war swept through and the old prescriptions stopped holding, doctors came together and asked out loud whether the classics still applied to the bodies in front of them. Entire schools of the medicine were born from those arguments. Our materia medica carries the same fingerprints: opinions recorded during catastrophe, revised when the evidence changed.
Western science keeps margins too. PubMed is a running archive of recorded findings, and the study published next year will look at the same question from another angle. That is the design. Revision is the normal state of knowledge, in the classics and in the journals alike.
The grain-free DCM scare is a recent example of the same process at work. A claim moved fast on incomplete evidence, took the shape of settled fact, and then got revised once more data came in. I walked through what actually happened, and where the nutrient at the center of it really comes from, in where taurine actually lives.
That is what a living science looks like. The disagreement is the method. Nobody preserved those arguments by accident. They preserved them because the argument was the medicine moving forward.
Now look at where dog nutrition gets debated today. A Facebook group where a moderator can turn off the comments. Where the data set behind the loudest opinion is one dog, or two, or three. Where you tow the line or you lose the platform. When someone does not allow discourse, they are not promoting the advancement of knowledge. They are protecting an ideology. True scientists do not talk louder to make you believe them. They get curious and ask, why do you see it differently?
We went from two thousand years of printed disagreement to a locked thread.
And then we wonder why a devoted owner stands in her kitchen afraid of a root vegetable.
My Own Turn
I questioned my own tribe
I say this as someone who had to do it, and it cost me something.
I have been feeding dogs fresh food since 1979, following my dad around as we mixed ground beef with that night’s leftovers. There were no rules then. The rules came later: 80/10/10, prey model, BARF, formulated recipes. Raw feeding went from something families just did to a belief system with positions to defend.
Then, about six years ago, the evidence started arriving in a sequence I could not ignore.
My dogs used to get occasional mucus in their stool, which is the body speaking quietly before it has to speak loudly. Since the switch, nothing. No gastro issues at all.
No one pays my dogs’ vet bills but me. So I took every lesson from every sick client dog and changed how I feed my own.
The Pattern I See
Two camps, two opposite imbalances
In Kampo medicine, before we ever choose an herbal formula, we look at the body, touch it, ask about it. Is this body dry and in need of nourishment, or is it in a state of excess that needs clearing? Is there too much fluid or too little? Too much energy or not enough? When I run dogs through that lens, a pattern shows up. Tap each camp below.
Kibble fed dogs tend toward dry.
These are bodies that read as depleted of moisture, bodies that need building and nourishing. And still, I want to be fair to the evidence, because that is the point of this whole article. Kibble fed dogs can live many years. I have personally known clients’ dogs reach 20 on kibble with fresh toppers. I know breeders in their late seventies, showing dogs for over 50 years, raising litter after litter on kibble. When I see a healthy data set of dogs, I get curious. That is the posture the comment sections have lost.
Raw fed dogs tend toward excess.
Diets too rich, too high in fat and protein for the body in front of them, driving reflux, gut trouble, and strained kidney and liver values. Some dogs with strong terrain run very high fat, even keto levels, without trouble. For others it is only a question of when. Raw is the polar opposite of kibble, so it does not surprise me that its problems show up at the opposite pole.
Neither camp asks the only question that counts: is this diet right for the dog in front of me?
In TCM we say dogs have elements, and I want to be precise about what that means, because it has been badly translated. It is nothing like a horoscope. It is a way of asking where this dog’s weak link is. The liver, the digestion, the lungs, the heart, the kidneys. Keep the weak link strong and the other symptoms tend not to show up. I wrote about how this works for Wood element dogs here.
Where I Landed
What cooked food taught me
Here is something that surprised me. Moving a client from raw to cooked is harder than moving a client from kibble to raw. The evidence is not the obstacle. The tribe is.
Cooked feeding has its own rules, and they are different.
Never feed cooked fat. The pancreas cannot handle it, and pancreatitis is how you find out. This is the single biggest difference from raw feeding, where some dogs run at very high fat without trouble.
The value I watch in every recipe I write is protein per 1,000 kcal. I arrived at my target range by analyzing what a dog would actually get from prey model raw, and I wrote about that work in why I changed my mind about raw feeding. To stay inside those ranges in a cooked diet, I had to turn to root vegetables. Even grain.
I can already hear it. Dogs don’t need carbs. True, carbohydrates are not an essential nutrient for dogs. They are not essential for humans either, and we seem to do something with them anyway. History is on the same side. Dogs have eaten what we ate for thousands of years, and what we ate included roots and grains. Look at their teeth. And there is published work suggesting some breeds do better with some grain in the diet.
Most owners are willing to try once they see the results. The change I hear about most is in the seniors. Older dogs gain energy. Fewer vet visits follow, and at today’s prices, that gets people’s attention.
Back to the Kitchen
The truth reveals itself
Which brings me back to the client and her sweet potato.
Competing information resolves the same way it has resolved for two thousand years. You test the claim against the body in front of you. The old doctors did it after every plague and wrote down what they found, disagreements included. The next study on PubMed will do it again from another angle. You can do it in your own kitchen. The body is always communicating. Mucus in the stool, creeping lab values, a senior dog going flat: those are the margins where your dog writes his commentary on the diet you chose.
If what you have been feeding has produced repeat vet visits and poor lab markers, you have a choice. You can double down. You can stay frozen because a group of well meaning strangers might disapprove. Or you can get curious, the way every good doctor before you did.
There is a line often credited to Einstein: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. If what you have been doing led you here, questioning the way you feed, maybe that is the body’s way of saying, let’s explore some new ideas. Then do it responsibly. Measure the labwork if that is your way. Watch their vitality.
I told my client what I will tell you. Don’t take my word for it either. Try it, and let your own dog tell you.
Work With Me
If your dog’s body is communicating
Creeping lab values, mucus in the stool, a senior gone flat: these are signals worth reading, not fearing. I formulate cooked, balanced recipes for the dog in front of you, built around that dog’s weak link, not around a camp’s rules.
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Hannah Zulueta obtained her Certificate in Canine Nutrition from CASI Institute. She is also studying for her Doctorate in Acupuncture, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Herbalism from the esteemed Pacific College of Health and Medicine. If you’re as keenly interested in health for yourself, visit her website for human health: Satori Acupuncture and Herbs.
She resides in San Diego with her three dogs, Maggie, Orbit, and Mr. Higgins.
She is available for one on one consultations. She develops evidence-based recipes that meet both NRC and AAFCO nutritional standards while integrating the therapeutic food principles of Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine into her formulations.
Additionally, you can find her sharing free content on Instagram.
