Product Review: I and Love and You Super Power Powder

What a product name!

A few months back my local Whole Foods picked up the I and Love and You product line. As one does, I cruised through all of their offerings, which include a variety of supplements, remedies, and food. They only have a few things Silas can eat, and I’ve been slowly trying the most appealing of them.

We started with their Salmon Sauce, which is a pretty typical salmon oil supplement. Even though Silas is allergic to salmon, salmon oil seems to help more with his itchiness than any of the other fish oils. We’ve now officially switched to this one from our old pump-top bottle, because the dispenser is the only 100% mess free fish oil we’ve used. Not one drip!

I had initially bypassed their daily supplement. It’s a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none kind of mix. It has some glucosamine and chondroitin. It has some digestive enzymes. It has some vitamins. It has some micronutrients. It doesn’t have a lot of any of those things, though. To pull a random example, the product has 150mg of glucosamine in two teaspoons, which is the recommended serving for a 50-100 pound dog. I’ve seen glucosamine recommendations as high as 1000mg for a dog that size. Another example at random: Super Power Powder has 7.5 IU of vitamin E. Mary Straus at Dog Aware suggests 1-2 IU of vitamine E per pound for dogs who eat raw diets.

To be fair, I and Love and You does not market this food as a supplement to homemade raw diets. Their copy quite clearly states that they’re hoping to compensate for the natural loss of nutrients as prepared food is cooked and stored. Adding 100% of the RDA for all the key vitamins on top of a prepared food that is intended to be nutritionally complete would be too much. This same premise that makes it safe for kibble-feeders makes it a less than perfect vitamin for people who feed homemade raw.

Even though the vitamin amounts are not ideal for our needs, this supplement absolutely wins where it counts:

Silas will eat it.

The I and Love and You vitamin powder stinks (literally). But apparently one of the things it stinks of is its natural peanut butter flavor. After his initial new-food skepticism, Silas has been eating it just fine. (Although, writing this review, I’ve realized that we still aren’t up to the full daily amount.)

We have rejected a lot of vitamins over the years. The Pet-Tabs the vet prescribed when he was a puppy have failed several lead contamination tests. Ian Billinghurst’s E-Barf Plus seems to bother Silas’s stomach, even though Silas didn’t mind the taste. It also doesn’t list vitamin quantities one way or another. Silas would rather starve than eat the Animal Essentials Herbal Multi-Vitamin I bought after I exhaustively researched the most perfect supplement Silas could eat. The nice, basic-but-solid blend from B-Naturals has chicken liver, as do many of the others on the market. We used a powdered greens mix for a while, but Silas wasn’t wild about it. Many raw-feeders recommend using a human multivitamin, but Silas is too small.

The bottom line: we’re happily accepting that a less-than-ideal supplement is better than none at all. Since Silas does eat some prepared “complete and balanced” food, I’m comfortable with the compromise.

 

Fine print: I bought this myself.