DAFY stands for (Dog Advice For You) and DAFY Nutrition was created for dog owners who want to follow evidence-based advice when it comes to feeding their dog.
DAFY is not here to make you feel guilty. DAFY is here to help you ask better questions and make informed choices for your dog.
In 2019 Rusty (AKA my soul dog) entered my life.
Cavaliers are a breed with known health issues so, very quickly, I became interested in how nutrition could support his long-term health.
At first, I just wanted to understand what to feed him, but the more I learned, the more I realised how confusing dog nutrition is for owners.
Everyone has an opinion, the advice is often conflicting and it can be very hard to know who to trust.
Rusty is the reason I started asking better questions.
I started studying canine nutrition through different courses and qualifications, including the BCCS Canine Health & Nutrition, CASI canine nutrition and Feed Real Institute courses.
But I did not want to stop at becoming “certified”.
Dog nutrition is full of online opinions.
I wanted to understand the subject at a deeper level, with proper academic structure, scientific references and expert teaching behind it.
That is what led me (in 2026) to study a Master in Dog and Cat Nutrition at the University of Teramo.
The more I studied, the more important it became to me to separate evidence-based canine nutrition from online opinions, trends and oversimplified advice.
From 2022 to 2025, I started Rusty’s Dog Club & Hotel in Bournemouth.
For three years, I cared for dogs every day and worked closely with their owners. I saw how different every dog was, how much owners worried about doing the right thing, and how often nutrition came up in conversations.
Some dogs had sensitive stomachs. Some were picky. Some were overweight. Some were on completely different diets. Most owners were simply trying their best with the information they had.
That experience shaped DAFY massively.
It taught me that nutrition advice has to be practical. It has to work for real homes, real routines and real dogs, not just sound good on paper.
In 2025, I launched the DAFY Podcast. I wanted dog owners to hear from experts who really know this field.
Through the podcast, I have interviewed vets, veterinary nutritionists, researchers, scientists and dog health experts on topics such as obesity, gut health, allergies, the microbiome, homemade diets, supplements and preventative care.
Those conversations became a big part of DAFY’s mission.
One question kept coming up again and again:
How do I home cook for my dog safely?
More and more dog owners want to cook for their dogs, but do not know which recipes to trust.
A lot of homemade recipes online look healthy, but they do not explain whether the diet is complete and balanced, how much to feed, or which supplement is actually needed.
That is where homemade feeding can go wrong.
That is why DAFY’s homemade recipes were created: properly formulated recipes for healthy adult dogs, reviewed by a veterinary nutritionist before publication.
When I started formulating DAFY recipes, I kept coming back to the same problem: UK dog owners did not have an easy way to access a supplement designed specifically to balance homemade diets.
That is why I decided to bring V-Integra to the UK and use it as part of all DAFY recipes.
What comes next
My mission is to make properly formulated homemade feeding more accessible in the UK.
DAFY is starting with recipes for healthy adult dogs, because that is the safest and most appropriate place to begin.
In the future, the goal is to expand carefully into recipes for other life stages and health needs, always with the right expert input and formulation behind them.
Puppies, senior dogs and dogs with medical conditions do not just need “a homemade recipe”. They need a diet that is appropriate for their life stage, health status and nutritional requirements.
That is the standard I want DAFY to keep.
