What is meant by life stage nutrition?

Life stage nutrition is a critical topic. There are three different stages that your dog can be in—puppy, adult, or senior. And you must buy food based on that stage, just because the nutrients and the calories that they need are very different at each stage.

Right, so that's going to be where if you've got a puppy, you want to make sure that you're feeding puppy food. If you've got a pet who is a year or older, then you want to feed it adult food, and then we start that whole geriatric classification around seven or eight years of age, you’ll go with the senior food. Some of our older pets have issues with maintaining weight or keeping weight on, and so you'll see some senior pet diets out there for when they reach that seven or eight-year-old mark.

If you have a senior dog, your nutritional needs may differ from when you have a puppy. The sporting or the hunting dogs may do better on a diet different from maintenance nutrition meant for dogs that aren't as active. It depends on the breed, but we generally start recommending senior dog food from 7 to 9 years of age and puppy food from 8 to 14 months.

Life stages in dog food can be broken down into three categories: puppy, adult, and senior. Puppy food is essential for puppies' rapid growth and development, while adult food (sometimes called maintenance or all life stages) is suitable for dogs once they've reached their full size. Senior diets are a good option for older dogs.

Life stage nutrition categorizes nutrition into the best foods for a puppy, an adult, and a senior dog. Depending on the size of the dog, the puppy stage is considered anywhere between a year to about 18 months of age for a large breed, and then adult stages from there to about seven or eight. After that comes the senior stage, which for large breed dogs, starts more around six years of age.