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We all know the feeling of watching our fur kids suffer — whether it’s due to fear of thunder and fireworks, the dreaded cone and confusion after surgery, or painful arthritis from older age. One of the worst experiences as pet owners is when your dog suffers from food allergies. Unlike environmental allergies and seasonal allergies, food allergies can be extremely difficult to isolate, diagnose and treat. It can feel like a never-ending struggle to pinpoint what the reaction is to and thus treat your dog’s suffering. We hope this will help you to gain a better understanding of dog food allergies, hypoallergenic pet food, and how to find the best food for dogs with allergies to give your pup a happier and healthier life free from discomfort.
What Is A Food Allergy?
Food allergies are incredibly common among dogs. A 2017 study revealed that, for dogs with itching and allergy symptoms, 1 in 5 are attributed to adverse food reactions. Food allergies in dogs, known as Cutaneous Adverse Food Reaction (CAFR), are an immune response to specific ingredients, usually protein. Your dog’s immune system identifies allergens as threats, which triggers an abundance of histamines to fight the threat. While histamines fight allergens, they also cause inflammation in the skin and/or gut, resulting in an allergic reaction. The most common allergens in dogs are beef, dairy, chicken or other similar animal protein sources.
Food allergies are distinct from food sensitivity, which is a dog’s intolerance or inability to digest certain foods, rather than the immune system’s response to a specific ingredient. For example, a dog could be lactose intolerant, which occurs when a dog cannot metabolize lactose in milk well, causing gastrointestinal upset or diarrhea. In other words, a food sensitivity could refer to a dog’s reaction to a type of food, rather than an immunological response to a specific ingredient.
Common symptoms of food allergies include:
Digestive Issues and Sensitive Stomachs: diarrhea, vomiting, excessive gas
Itchiness: itchy skin, constantly licking paws, frequently rubbing their faces
Recurring Ear Infections
Skin Allergies: redness and hot spots, inflamed, irritated skin issues or skin infections
When your dog is feeling so uncomfortable, they could experience secondary symptoms such as behavioral changes. This could look like not wanting to play, lack of interest in eating, frequently shaking their ears, and restlessness.
Whatever the symptom, food allergies and food sensitivity cause a lot of misery and discomfort in dogs and should be addressed right away.
What Can You Do For A Dog Suffering From Food Allergies
If your dog is suffering from allergies or experiencing skin or digestive issues, it’s important to see a vet, who will likely start with an elimination diet in an effort to isolate the allergen and eliminate it from your dog’s diet. A strict elimination diet is really the only way to diagnose whether food is the source of your dog’s allergies, separate and apart from environmental allergies, for example. While working to resolve the root of the problem, a vet can also prescribe anti-inflammatory medications to help alleviate your dog’s symptoms.
There are two kinds of elimination diets. First, novel protein diets contain a single protein and single carbohydrate. The second type of elimination diet is hydrolyzed protein (“HP” diets), where the protein’s amino acids have been broken down so that the immune system does not react to them.
It’s important to exclude other possible sources of the food allergens being eliminated, such as flavored dog treats, rawhides, table food scraps, flavored dog toys, and minerals and supplements. Flea allergy medications, flea preventives, heartworm chewables and medication capsules often contain beef, pork or soy protein, and thus must be removed. If there are other dogs in the household, they must be fed separately and cannot share water bowls, which could also lead to cross-contamination.
Keeping a diary can be very helpful during the elimination diet. Tracking meals, treats, and any allergy symptoms. Including activities such as daycare, vet visits, household guests, and trips to the dog park can also help to identify possible breaks from the elimination diet or even environmental allergens that cannot necessarily be attributed to your dog’s diet.
Most dogs stay on an elimination prescription diet for up to 10 weeks, but some vets recommend as long as 12 weeks. At the end of the elimination diet, your dog can do what is known as a dietary rechallenge using specific ingredients. Unlike some people, dogs do not outgrow allergies, so there is little point in reintroducing what might have been a prior allergen. Allergic reactions, such as itchy skin or rashes, usually occur within days if not sooner. If your dog’s symptoms return, they should be placed back on the elimination diet. Even with limited ingredient pet foods, finding a new pet food that does not contain ingredients that could cause cross-reactivity is not always practical. This can be an overwhelming process, so many pet owners choose to keep their dog on whatever food was used during the elimination diet, so as to avoid ongoing skin allergies and flare ups.
Of course, pet owners can work directly with a veterinary nutritionist to formulate a complete and balanced homecooked diet. This way, individuals can cook their dog’s diet using specific protein sources, not just free of common allergens but rather free from the allergens specific to their own dog. This, too, is not always practical. In addition, homemade diets, even when formulated with a nutritionist, often don’t have the commercial controls in place to ensure all the critical nutrients are consistently provided.
What Is Hypoallergenic Dog Food
Hypoallergenic dog food refers to any food that does not contain common allergens, which are beef, dairy, chicken, fish, eggs, corn, wheat gluten and soy. More specifically, it is formulated to reduce the risk of allergic reactions to protein sources. There are two kinds of hypoallergenic dog food:
Novel Protein Diets: contain a single protein that most dogs have not been exposed to before
Hydrolyzed Protein (“HP”) Diets: protein amino acid chains that have been broken down and thus do not risk causing allergic reactions
In addition to novel protein and HP diets, you will sometimes find “Limited Ingredient” recipes markets as hypoallergenic solutions, since fewer ingredients mean fewer potential allergens.
Novel protein diets should aim not to include any ingredients from the dog’s previous diet. This can be more complicated than it first sounds due to the potential for allergenic cross-reactivity, which occurs when your dog’s immune system, already sensitive to one ingredient, mistakes a similar protein allergen as a threat, causing an allergic reaction. Thus novel protein diets must also not include ingredients capable of cross-reacting with animal proteins in your dog’s previous diet — so, lamb should be avoided if your dog was previously fed beef or dairy, and vice versa. There has also been cross-reactivity found between chicken, salmon and whitefish.
As you can imagine from the above, formulating a hypoallergenic dog food that addresses all of these concerns and potential food allergens, especially with respect to the possibility of cross-reactivity, would seem impossible. So how do commercial pet food companies do it?
The truth is that the most common veterinary diets used to treat food allergies are made of plant protein, which is less likely to trigger allergic reactions. Hill’s Prescription Diet for food sensitivities is made with hydrolyzed soy protein and without animal protein. Similarly, Royal Canin’s hypoallergenic dog food’s predominant protein source is hydrolyzed soy protein. While there is a presence of animal fat for palatability, dogs have allergic reactions to protein sources rather than fat.
When Hypoallergenic Dog Food Doesn’t Work
It is not uncommon for allergy symptoms not to subside, even after the full term of an elimination diet. Though 1 in 5 dogs display food insensitivities, true food allergies, meaning the immune system’s response to an allergen, are less common. This is where making some additional changes to your dog’s diet could certainly help manage skin conditions and diseases. And especially where there is a food allergy, taking the following concerns into consideration can also assist your dog’s condition.
Potential Food Sensitivity Triggers:
Additives: Chemicals, preservatives, coloring, flavoring, dyes, and palatants will not trigger an allergic reaction but could cause indigestion and food intolerance.
Byproduct Meal Ingredients: Meal, whether animal or vegetable, is a common ingredient in kibble. It is made from the by-products of processing and then heated at high temperatures into powder.
With Fat, Quality Matters: Pure fats, like fish oil, are free of protein and shouldn’t trigger a response. But traces of protein can remain in animal fats during processing, and may cause an allergic reaction.
The fact is that hypoallergenic food does not necessarily mean high quality. Food that is formulated to treat food allergies to specific protein sources is often ultra-processed, full of fillers and by-product animal fats as the top ingredients that could continue to pose gastrointestinal and digestive issues for both dogs with true food allergies and those without. In other words, in an effort to treat one problem, your hypoallergenic dry dog food could be causing others!
At Bramble, we believe in feeding high-quality, fresh dog food for the same reason we believe in feeding ourselves this way: whole food, made with fresh ingredients that are gently cooked, is better in quality, digestibility and taste. The fresher, less processed the food, the more nutritious it is – for ourselves and our pets!
With respect to food sensitivities, we can draw parallels to our own diets. Consider wheat. People have been increasingly sensitive to wheat gluten, which begs the question whether it is wheat, per se, or what the American food system does to a lot of the wheat we consume. In order to make items such as bread, cereal and pasta more shelf stable, companies strip wheat of the bran, fiber and nutrients. Folic acid is then added to enrich the nutrient-dead ingredients. Depending on the product, bleach, synthetic dyes and preservatives are also added. It should come as no surprise that more and more people have difficulty metabolizing wheat that has been stripped of its nutritional value, enriched, bleached, and dyed. In contrast, those same people might have less of a food sensitivity to wheat in its whole, unrefined form. This is the same for dogs.
Indeed, grain-free dog food has overwhelmingly increased in popularity. In reality, grain-free is a solution in search of a problem — vet nutritionists say that dog allergies to grain do not really exist. Rather, dogs have food sensitivities to the processed, refined grains — often the byproducts of the refining done to human-grade grain — that make up dry dog food. In this case, where the culprit is often low-quality ingredients that are then further processed into dry food, grain-free kibble offers no real benefit at all.
Hypoallergenic pet food, including plant-based, fish, and other novel proteins such as venison, could solve for true food allergies, but not for food sensitivities and could even lead to other problems, such as diabetes, weight gain, and other chronic conditions. Royal Canin’s hydrolyzed protein recipe’s very first ingredient is Brewer’s Rice, which are the fragments of white rice leftover from the milling process for human consumption. It is a cheap carbohydrate filler that is better known for causing weight gain and far less nutrient dense than whole grain white or brown rice. While 20% of dogs suffer from food allergies and sensitivity, more than 50% of dogs are obese or overweight, which is attributable to overfeeding our dogs ultra-processed food.
Choosing The Best Dog Food For Allergies
Just like choosing any dog food, choosing the best dog food for allergies will ultimately come down to each dog. Here are some things to consider in choosing a hypoallergenic dog food:
Have you completed an elimination diet and been able to identify a known food allergen? This can help you to choose a new protein source. If not, a lot of pet owners choose to remain on the food used during the elimination phase, which is often a plant-based protein.
Ingredients: If you choose a novel protein source, such as fish or venison, are there other ingredients that could cause a cross-reaction?
Quality: Is your hypoallergenic pet food the quality you’re looking for? Is it ultra-processed or does it contain other ingredients that could lead to digestive issues, food sensitivities, or other issues like diabetes or weight gain? Is this a food you would feel comfortable feeding yourself everyday?
Cost: Hypoallergenic food can sometimes be more expensive, but you will save the money on repeated vet visits and medication. Keeping your dog comfortable and healthy is what is most important.
Palatability: Does your dog enjoy their food and will they be willing to eat it on a regular basis?
Food allergies and food sensitivity in your beloved fur baby can cause a lot of distress, both to your pet and you. It is hard enough to find a food that your dog’s body can tolerate, but that also nourishes them for a long, healthy life. What is more, we also want our dogs to devour their food at meal time. Striking this balance can sometimes feel impossible with the hypoallergenic dog food options on the market.
At Bramble, we know these pet parents well. You’ve tried everything, and nothing seems to work; or, your dog hates the only food that doesn’t upset their sensitive stomachs or cause allergic reactions. There is truly nothing we love more than being able to provide a solution for you and your fur baby.
Bramble’s hypoallergenic dog food is free from any of the common allergens, including beef, chicken, dairy, eggs, soy, corn and wheat gluten. Our organic plant protein and high quality human-grade ingredients are gently cooked, not ultra-processed. We don’t use synthetic vitamins or minerals. Bramble’s feeding trial showed that dogs fed Bramble have improved gut health and lower cholesterol, which means Bramble is a great choice for maintaining a healthy weight. And dogs absolutely love Bramble.
What truly defines something as hypoallergenic will be specific to each individual dog. For example, if a dog is allergic to sweet potato or pea protein, then even Bramble will not be hypoallergenic for that dog. But because most dogs are allergic to beef, dairy, chicken, fish, wheat gluten, eggs or soy, as well as other protein sources that could possibly cause cross-reactivity, Bramble would be hypoallergenic for most dogs. More importantly, because Bramble is a human-grade, gently cooked fresh food, it is not only the best dog food for allergies, but also benefits dogs with food sensitivities, while also nourishing all dogs for a happier, healthier and longer life.
You can shop for Bramble’s fresh hypoallergenic dog food here.