By James O'Brien for Pawalla

What if you reached into the fridge every day and took out exactly the same thing for lunch?

What if you chopped exactly the same vegetables and mixed together precisely the same ingredients for every dinner?

Answer: you'd get pretty bored of what you were eating, pretty quick, and you'd start facing mealtime with frustration.

If you think about it, the same thing is true for your pet partner: dog or cat. Two legs or four, it's hard to imagine getting excited about the same exact grub, every meal.

Furthermore, it's about nutrition. This isn't a new idea.

Helen M. Davis, writing about animal food studies in the middle of the last century, included this conclusion in Science News Letter: "The vitamins required by the animals are the same as those now essential for human nutrition . . . a well-balanced diet . . . with reasonable assurance that a varied diet . . . will assure an adequate vitamin allowance."

Or, as the current Merck Veterinary Manual puts it: "Dog or cat foods or homemade diets derived from a single food item are inadequate."

With that in mind, let's take a look at food variety and what it means for your companion animals. We'll also look at how Pawalla can make it easy to give your pet partner a diverse and delicious lifestyle.

Why Vary the Diet?: How Pets Benefit from Good Eating

There are two main ideas when it comes to the health benefits that stem from a varied diet for your pet.

Good Nutrition: Just like people, nutritionists advise varying kinds of food to ensure a spectrum of good nutrition. It's just common sense. Eat beef and beef alone, and you're in for all kinds of trouble. But mix your intake with vegetables, fish, chicken, and so on, and your body extracts all the things it needs from these various kinds of food. Your pet counts on you to provide a similar diversity of ingredients. As the weeks go by, shuffle the kinds of animal and plant food that they get in their bowls. Keep those vitamins and minerals coming!

Allergy Prevention: Another major concept of food variety in your pet's diets is that exposure to the same main ingredients over and over again can cause allergies to develop. Nutritionists suggest that frequently switching wet foods can significantly change that likelihood for your dogs and cats.  Some vets, including Dr. Carol Jean Tillman, writing for Organic Pet Digest, even suggest eliminating dry foods in favor of a rotated wet-only diet as one strategy for controlling certain kinds of potentially  food-prompted allergies.

Pawalla and the Dinner Plate: Variety is Built In

Pawalla was founded on the belief that providing pets with a variety of wet food options enhances their health and life.

One of the advantages of Pawalla is that food diversity is already part of the program. As your new high-quality wet foods and other supplements come through in the mail, you'll automatically receive a variety of choices.

Also, from gourmet to organic, from all-natural to human-grade pet foods, you won't have to worry about exhausting your grocer's or specialty-store's selection. Pawalla taps into providers that retailers often don't carry. So if your new goal is to provide a healthy rotation of some of the best available natural foods for your pet to sample — then Pawalla has you and your pet partners covered.

From nutrition to allergy prevention, to just a plain old happy frame of mind for your four-pawed friends, take variety to heart. Feeding your furry companions well is a daily (and important) way to say that you love them.