The homemade and raw diet trap: what 200 recipes revealed

A homemade diet is any ration an owner prepares from scratch rather than buying as a complete food, and a raw or BARF diet is a version built largely on uncooked meat, bone and offal. Both are growing in popularity, driven by a reasonable instinct: that fresh, recognisable ingredients must be better than processed kibble. The instinct is understandable and the data is unkind to it. The single most informative study in this area looked at what actually ends up in the bowl when owners follow recipes, and the result should give any home cook pause. This article walks through that evidence and what it means in practice. Nothing here is a prescription: balancing a home ration is a job for a board-certified veterinary nutritionist.

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General documentary information. For an individual animal, a veterinarian's advice takes precedence over any online content.

The 95 percent finding

The reference study comes from UC Davis. Stockman and Larsen (2013) assessed 200 homemade recipes drawn from books and the internet and found that 95 percent were deficient in at least one essential nutrient (UC Davis, 2013). That figure alone reframes the topic: following a recipe you found is, statistically, a near-guarantee of an unbalanced ration. The shortfalls were not trivial rounding errors either. More than 83 percent of the recipes stacked several deficiencies at once, and the most frequently missing nutrients were choline, vitamin D, zinc and vitamin E (UC Davis, 2013).

The detail that unsettles people most is the source of the recipes. Recipes written by general-practice veterinarians, even published in mainstream books, sat among the 95 percent of deficient recipes, of which 92 percent gave vague instructions (UC Davis, 2013). The rare recipes that held up were those written by board-certified veterinary nutritionists. Good intentions and even a medical degree do not substitute for formal nutritional formulation.

Why each deficiency matters

Nutrient gaps are not abstract. Each has a clinical translation. A calcium shortfall weakens the developing skeleton, a lack of taurine in the cat can induce cardiomyopathy, and a vitamin E insufficiency impairs cell defences. Because more than 83 percent of homemade recipes stack several of these at once (UC Davis, 2013), the home cook is rarely dealing with a single fixable gap, but with a pattern of them.

The most deceptive part is the timeline. A deficient animal can look healthy for months while the shortfall accumulates, which is exactly why 95 percent of homemade rations tested were deficient yet the problem so often goes unnoticed until something breaks (UC Davis, 2013). The absence of immediate symptoms is not evidence that the diet is working.

The bone-and-calcium problem

The single most common structural error in home rations concerns calcium. Replacing bone in a recipe is not simply about adding calcium: it is about preserving the target calcium-to-phosphorus ratio, between 1:1 and 2:1 (FEDIAF, 2025). Meat is rich in phosphorus and poor in calcium, so a muscle-meat ration without a correctly calculated calcium source skews the ratio badly, which is especially dangerous for growing large-breed puppies. This is the kind of calculation that looks simple and is not, and getting it wrong undoes the whole ration.

What the data says about raw specifically

Raw feeding adds a second category of risk on top of the balance problem: pathogens. The FDA's sampling between 2010 and 2012 put a number on commercial raw contamination, finding Salmonella in around 8 percent of commercial raw products (FDA, 2010 to 2012). More worrying from a public-health angle, a study documented antibiotic-resistant Enterobacteriaceae in raw foods, raising a concern that reaches beyond the animal to the household handling the food (PMC, 2019). This is why the WSAVA, which federates about 113 member associations representing more than 390,000 veterinarians, concludes that there is no documented evidence of a health benefit from raw diets while the risks are well established (WSAVA, 2021).

The 80/10/10 illusion

Many raw feeders follow a simple proportional rule, often summarised as 80 percent muscle meat, 10 percent bone and 10 percent offal, and assume that hitting those ratios means the bowl is balanced. It does not. A ration set by live weight or by these proportions can be right in volume yet short on calcium, zinc or iodine, because the rule governs the gross composition of tissue, not the micronutrient profile an animal actually needs (UC Davis, 2013). An 80/10/10 bowl can honour the proportions and still fall short on zinc, iodine, vitamin D or omega-3 fatty acids (UC Davis, 2013). The proportions feel scientific because they are specific, but specificity is not the same as adequacy. The nutrients most likely to be missing are precisely the ones a tidy meat-bone-offal ratio never accounts for.

Benefits observed versus benefits proven

It is fair to acknowledge that many raw feeders report shinier coats, smaller stools and more energy, and the Raw Feeding Veterinary Society defends these benefits within a structured framework (RFVS, 2021). The difficulty is the type of evidence. The reference review by Freeman and colleagues examined the available data and concluded that none of the claimed benefits is robustly demonstrated by controlled trials, leaving a clear gap between reported and proven effects (JAVMA, 2013). The benefits rest on owner observation rather than controlled clinical study, a distinction that shapes the whole debate (JAVMA, 2013). And where a benefit is real, such as a glossier coat, the same effect would appear with a premium kibble, since no controlled trial has shown raw to be superior (JAVMA, 2013), and a well-formulated premium kibble reaches the same nutritional targets (Tufts Petfoodology, 2025). Observation is a reason to investigate, not a reason to conclude.

"Dogs are wolves" does not survive the genetics

A frequent argument for raw is that dogs are essentially wolves and should eat as wolves do. The genetics complicate this neatly. Axelsson and colleagues showed that dogs carry, on average, several extra copies of the AMY2B gene for pancreatic amylase compared with wolves, raising their capacity to digest starch (Nature, 2013). Domestication adapted the dog to a more varied, starch-tolerant diet, so the wolf comparison is the wrong template. More to the point, even granting that a dog can digest raw meat, digestion was never the issue: a dog can digest raw meat while remaining exposed to Salmonella and to the deficiencies of an unformulated bowl (FDA; UC Davis, 2013). The ancestral-diet argument answers a question nobody was asking and skips the two, balance and pathogens, that actually matter.

The evidence in one table

Alt text: "Infographic of 100 recipe cards with 95 marked deficient, alongside a panel naming choline, vitamin D, zinc and vitamin E as the most commonly missing nutrients."

If you still want to feed fresh

None of this means home feeding is impossible, only that it cannot be improvised. The route that works is to have a ration formulated by a board-certified veterinary nutritionist for your specific animal, to weigh ingredients rather than estimate them, and to use the precise supplement quantities the formulation specifies rather than a generic multivitamin. For raw specifically, strict kitchen hygiene protects the human household as much as the animal. The common thread is that "fresh" buys nothing without "balanced", and balance here is a quantitative exercise, not a matter of good ingredients.

Cooking fixes the germs, not the balance

A reasonable reaction to the raw pathogen data is to cook the food, and that does address one risk: heat reduces Salmonella and the other organisms that make raw feeding a household hygiene concern (FDA, 2010 to 2012). What cooking does nothing for is balance. A gently cooked chicken-and-rice bowl is just as exposed to the 95 percent deficiency finding as a raw one, because the missing choline, vitamin D, zinc and vitamin E were never going to appear from the ingredients chosen (UC Davis, 2013). The two problems are independent: pathogens are a processing question, balance is a formulation question, and solving one leaves the other untouched. This is why "I cook it myself so it is safe" is only half right. It may well be safer from a microbiological point of view and still be nutritionally incomplete.

The practical upshot is that supplements are not an optional extra in home feeding, they are the part that makes the ration work, and their quantities have to be calculated rather than guessed. A formulation from a board-certified veterinary nutritionist specifies exactly which supplements, in what amounts, for your specific animal at its specific life stage. That service exists precisely because the calculation is too unforgiving to improvise, and it is the single most reliable way to feed fresh without joining the 95 percent.

It is also worth resisting the temptation to swap one ingredient for another in an otherwise formulated recipe. Because the nutrient profile is balanced as a whole, a substitution that looks harmless, beef for chicken, sweet potato for rice, can quietly shift the calcium, phosphorus or trace-mineral totals and reopen a deficiency the formulation had closed. A formulated recipe is a system, not a suggestion, and editing it casually is how a balanced ration drifts back into the deficient majority.

Where to read more (homemade diet)

The ration calculations, the WSAVA and AVMA positions, and the comparison between raw, cooked and freeze-dried formats are handled in our raw, BARF and home-cooked diets FAQ, and the calcium-to-phosphorus question that trips up so many home cooks sits in the protein and macronutrients FAQ. For a structured approach, the raw and home-cooked diet safety guide covers hygiene and formulation, and the choosing quality pet food guide explains how a complete commercial food is validated by comparison. The diet style itself is defined in our entry on BARF.

The takeaway (homemade diet)

The most rigorous look at home recipes found that 95 percent were deficient in at least one essential nutrient, that most stacked several gaps, and that even vet-written recipes were not reliably safe. Raw feeding layers measurable pathogen risk on top, with no documented health benefit to offset it. Fresh ingredients are not the problem and not the answer. The deciding factor is whether the ration is formally balanced, which is the work of a veterinary nutritionist, not of a recipe found online.