Hannah Zulueta The Approach · Cooked
I Changed My Mind About Raw
What the teeth say, what the interstitium changed, and what happened to my dogs’ bloodwork when I started cooking.
As I keep learning new perspectives on health, I sometimes find an old article of mine and think, that’s cute, and I have completely changed my mind on that. Years ago I wrote 33 Reasons Not to Feed Your Dog Raw Food, tongue in cheek, because I was deep in the raw food tribe and believed wholeheartedly that raw was the only way. Other people delete their past from their website. I would rather leave it up and tell you what changed.
The one thing
Cooking is transformation done outside the body.
When I fed raw, I was asking my dogs’ bodies to do all of that transformation work internally. By cooking, I begin the process externally and deliver food that is already partly prepared for the body to convert into vital energy.
That is a belief system as much as a mechanism, and yours may differ. What follows is why I feed my own dogs the way I do, not a rule for how you should feed yours.
Before anything else
There are many ways to feed a dog
Let me be clear before I share any of this. If you want to feed kibble or raw, go do it. If you are getting the health results you want, more power to you.
This is not about one way being universally right or wrong. It is about finding the approach that meets your own ideology and philosophy. I can help you with raw recipes and I can support you if you feed kibble. But if you want to feed cooked recipes, that is where I excel. That is truly my domain, my preference and my specialty.
The blueprint
What our dogs’ teeth tell us
In Traditional Chinese Medicine there is a principle that our teeth define the proportions of food we should eat. Human molars and premolars grind grain, incisors bite vegetables and fruit, canines cut meat. That is a natural dietary blueprint.
Applied to my dogs, their 42 teeth tell a completely different story. Sharp pointed premolars and molars built for shearing and crushing rather than grinding. Carnassial teeth that work like scissors to slice meat. Canines built for gripping and tearing. No flat grinding surfaces of the kind herbivores have.
Those adaptations break down like this:
The difference between a cat at one hundred percent sharp and a dog at mostly sharp tells us dogs evolved some capacity to process plant matter. Likely from scavenging and eating the stomach contents of prey. Or more likely, from being domesticated and fed our leftovers for thousands of years.
Roughly 70 to 75 percent animal protein, 20 to 25 percent vegetables and fruit, minimal to no grain. That is the blueprint I cook to.
The template
How I apply whole prey wisdom
I still follow the wisdom of the whole prey model, with one crucial modification. I cook the food.
Look at a whole chicken, minus feathers, and it provides about 80 grams of protein per 1000 kcal, roughly 32 percent protein on a caloric basis. That natural ratio, including muscle meat, organs, skin and the minerals from bone, is my template.
Vegetables from below and above ground go in, along with whole food fibers and omega oils to round it out. What changes is the fire, not the ratio.
The philosophy
Why fire transforms food
Part of my decision to cook comes from wanting to protect my dogs’ kidneys and liver from working harder than they should. But there is a deeper wisdom guiding it.
I follow the Fire Spirit School, as taught in the lineage of Dr. Liu Lihong, who often speaks through his partnership with Dr. Heiner Fruehauf. In this lineage we hold that food carries energy and that we must apply heat to extract it. Through cooking we transform food alchemically so the body can generate Qi from it.
That philosophy lines up with what I observe. Cooking breaks down protein structures, reduces the metabolic burden on organs, and lets the digestive system extract energy efficiently rather than struggling with tough raw proteins.
The center
Digestion is the center
In TCM we treat digestive function as the center. In Kampo medicine the belief is that all disease starts in the gut, and every diagnosis begins with Fukushin, a form of abdominal palpation used to sense what abnormalities are present.
In the Fire School, Dr. Liu Lihong has said there are two karmic wheels: the wheel of your life, and the karmic wheel of the food you eat. In many respects the food’s wheel comes first in the hierarchy. When I heard him say that, it changed how I think about the weight of a daily dietary decision.
Every meal we feed our dogs is either supporting their digestive center or challenging it.
When the digestive system is strong and unburdened, it transforms food into energy and nutrients efficiently. When we constantly challenge it with hard-to-digest raw proteins, potential pathogens or ultra-processed food, we weaken that center. And when the center is weak, everything follows: skin issues, allergies, organ stress, low energy.
This is why I have become particular about how I prepare food and not only what I choose. I am not just feeding my dogs. I am nurturing the digestive center that supports their whole being.
For those who know me personally, the same practice extends to how I take care of myself. I rarely drink coffee, I cut out dairy, I do not drink alcohol, we make our own food, and I avoid all ultra-processed ingredients. I am one of those people who checks the nutrients in my own meals to make sure I am covering my bases. I am 52 as I write this, and I can tell you wholeheartedly that how I feed myself correlates directly with how I feel.
What actually changed my mind
The interstitium
My understanding of the interstitium, the recently recognized fluid-filled network woven through our connective tissues, changed my perspective on how the body moves and defends itself. It acts like a vast honeycomb superhighway, connecting organs beneath the skin, along the digestive tract, and around muscles and blood vessels.
When bacteria from raw or contaminated food breach the gut barrier, they are not restricted to a local infection. The interstitium gives them rapid access to tissues throughout the body. Researchers now believe the same network could allow cancer cells to travel the same way, which would explain how metastasis moves through these fluid-filled spaces and connective pathways.
What happens in the digestive tract may directly influence distant organs like the liver and the kidneys. That is the part that reorganized my thinking.
The interstitium is a newly described organ network now being taught in anatomy classes for medical students. References are below if you want to read further. At this time the topic is only being covered in human medicine. The veterinary community has not begun discussing it.
The evidence in my house
What the bloodwork showed
The evidence turned up in my own dogs’ panels. On raw, their BUN and liver values were elevated.
The raw feeding community likes to cite studies claiming a high BUN is normal for raw-fed dogs. When I examined those studies closely, the methodology was flawed. More to the point, when I switched to cooked food while holding the same protein ratios, my dogs’ values normalized.
That told me something specific about my dogs. The elevation was not coming from the protein content. It was more likely their bodies working harder to deal with bacterial loads and endotoxins from raw meat.
The follow-up question
What about partially cooked?
Someone recently asked me about lightly searing raw to get the best of both worlds. Personally, for my dogs, I do not anymore.
For context, I am in the process of becoming a Doctor of Chinese Medicine, and our school clinic sees 40,000 patients a year. All we see and do is treat sick people. When you spend your days witnessing how things go wrong in the body, and how small choices compound into serious problems, you start to think differently about prevention.
I like to hedge the odds in my favor. Searing kills surface bacteria. It does not address bacteria throughout the meat. Either the food is cooked to a safe temperature all the way through or it is not. Given what I now understand about the interstitium as a distribution network, and given what I see daily in clinic, I choose fully cooked.
First, do no harm. That is the standard I hold myself to with my own dogs.
Where I landed
My current approach
The other question
Why I do not feed kibble
I do not feed kibble because it represents everything I avoid, which is ultra-processed food. High-heat extrusion creates advanced glycation end products. It requires synthetic vitamin premixes, relies on preservatives, and uses high-glycemic carbohydrates dogs do not need.
I also understand that for many people kibble is the practical choice that fits their life, and there are certainly dogs who thrive on a quality kibble. If that is your choice and your dog is healthy, I support you.
I often tell clients about the littermates of my own dogs who eat kibble and are doing well. The one thing their owners all do is top the bowl with fresh food so the diet is not entirely dry. Even so, I have observed that those dogs go to the vet more often than mine do, for various issues I do not see in my own house.
Each of my dogs came from a different breeder, and I stay in contact with the breeders and the littermates, so I get to watch how lifestyle and diet affect the way they age. What did the 30 oldest dogs eat? is worth reading alongside this.
The outcome
What I have seen since switching
- Improved coat quality.
- Better digestive health.
- More stable energy. My older dog, 10 and a half as I write this, actually gained energy when I took her off raw.
- Normalized kidney values.
- Perfect liver markers.
- Better overall vitality, which in TCM we would call strong Qi.
Where this leaves you
Finding your own path
I am no longer part of the raw food tribe, and I am at peace with that. If you are, and your dogs are thriving, that is wonderful. If you feed kibble and your dogs are healthy and happy, that is fantastic too.
Find what works for your philosophy, your life, and most of all what gives your individual dog the best health outcomes. Pay attention to their energy, their bloodwork, their coat, their joy. Those are your guides.
Our dogs’ teeth tell us what they should eat, which is mostly meat with some vegetables. How we prepare that food is where our individual philosophies come in. For me and my dogs, cooking has been the answer. For you and yours it might be something else, and that is exactly as it should be.
Work with me
If you want to make the switch properly
Cooked does not mean meat in a pan. You still need the protein ratio, the right calcium source, balanced nutrients, and ingredients chosen for their therapeutic properties rather than their nutrition panel alone. I have raw recipes for those who want them and I can guide you toward a quality kibble if that is your preference, but cooked meals are where my work lives. Book a consultation and we will build yours.
Related reading: high-histamine foods when your dog has lumps, your dog’s digestion, East and West, is your dog’s food making them worse, where taurine actually lives, and how to home-cook.
References
On the interstitium
- Benias PC, Wells RG, Sackey-Aboagye B, and others. Structure and distribution of an unrecognized interstitium in human tissues. Scientific Reports, 2018;8(1):4947. PubMed.
- Cenaj O, Allison DHR, Imam R, and others. Evidence for continuity of interstitial spaces across tissue and organ boundaries in humans. Communications Biology, 2021;4(1):436. PubMed.
- Ordner J, Narula N, Chiriboga L, and others. Continuity of interstitial spaces within and outside the human lung. Journal of Anatomy, 2024;247(5):1059-1068. PubMed.
- Theise ND, Kohnehshahri MN, Chiriboga LA, and others. Evidence of interstitial continuity within and beyond the human pancreas. Human Pathology, 2025;161:105855. PubMed.
The information on Daily Dog Food Recipes is intended for nutritional, informational and educational purposes only. Nothing here is intended to diagnose, cure, treat or prevent any disease or illness. Please consult your veterinarian about your dog’s medical care.
