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Need help with allergy food trials

3K views 34 replies 11 participants last post by  WIBackpacker 
#1 ·
Has anyone ever gone to a LID diet for allergies then added back foods to find out what your dog is allergic to? How does that type of testing work? If you did it, were you successful in eliminating all food allergies? We have two choices. One is to stay with the prescription novel protein diet indefinitely, maybe for the rest of his life. The other is to gradually add back foods and hope we can find out which ones don’t cause allergies, then try to find a food that only includes non allergen foods. It seems that proteins are the primary allergen, so raw is completely out. There could be other secondary allergens.
 
#3 ·
I’ve never done an elimination diet with a dog before. I have with babies when nursing to see why they all had horrible colic, and found dairy and gluten to be an issue while I was breastfeeding. I’m sure there is no correlation from that to a dog though, sorry! Lol

Lyka has a sensitive stomach, and gets itchy on certain foods, but I didn’t go the elimination route for ingredients, I lucked out and found Fromm caused no reactions with one switch, so that’s probably not super helpful either. Sorry!

What problems is she/he having that make you want to do an elimination diet?
 
#5 ·
I've done it a long time ago. I believe the method we used was one novel protein and one novel carbohydrate only for 30 full days. after which introducing one single ingredient per 30 day period. But they have to be non symptomatic on the first novel pair before you can introduce something else. If they aren't then you might have to try another novel protein/carb pair and wait another month

I did design her a diet based on her allergy test results that I home cooked for 6 or 7 years and she did fantastic on it. I eased her on to the home made diet as above, one ingredient at a time until I felt I had enough different ingredients that she was getting enough nutrition.
 
#7 ·
As far as I have been told, the blood test they did on my dog is not very respected. Maybe a waste of money, totally wrong.

Some of the other allergy testing, like for food mites and dust mites, I think are believed to be more accurate. Has your dog been tested for those allergies? Because if that's the cause then you're wasting a lot of time and effort on the food
 
#10 ·
What I did was make a list of all the foods I'd had my dog on. I wrote down the ingredients to see what they all had in common. Then found a food that didn't contain those things. Example, chicken, sweet potatoes, peas, fish, etc. I found one of my dogs doesn't do well on chicken, white or sweet potatoes or peas. Since you now have an LID food your dog does well on look at the ingredients. Look for other foods with similar ingredients/same protein. There is no reason you can't feed raw. Just don't feed the protein your dog has issues with. And there's always the possibility that the protein they have an issue with won't bother them in the raw state vs cooked or highly processed into kibble.
 
#11 ·
I got more information to share. They test food allergies first with a LID, then going back to the previous food to see if the allergies return. If they do, it’s back to the LID with one ingredient added at a time. All meat must be well cooked because cooking changes the protein and can make it less of an allergen. So, a protein allergic dog should not be fed raw. It takes three weeks to test each individual food, so if you want to go back to say Fromm, with 20 ingredients, it can take 60 weeks to run through each ingredient separately. I don’t have all the information but I’m guessing most people only test main ingredients in prepared foods. I’m thinking if he can eat cooked foods, I will probably end up cooking for him and adding supplements to make up what he is missing.
 
#12 ·
Commercial LID diets that you can buy at any pet food supply are only partially reliable. Research testing on them a while back found every brand they tested was contaminated with traces of ingredients not on the label because they don't clean out the extrusion equipment in between the runs of food -- so whatever was in the prior batch can slip into the LID batch. For some dogs, it's small enough to not trigger a reaction. For others, it does. Either way, it makes it hard to do reliable elimination diets. If the LID food fails, is it because the dog is allergic to one of its ingredients, or contamination? There's no way to know for sure.

This is why vets generally use RX hydrolyzed protein diets when they're doing an elimination diet for a suspected protein allergy.

They say you have to feed the same food for 6-8 weeks per food to this properly. No treats that have different ingredients, and no supplements that could be allergens either...the vet's instructions are very strict.
 
#13 ·
That is what they told me. I’m using RC novel protein, and slowly testing other foods. The other problem I found by reading labels is that foods made in other countries that are supposedly LID diets, like rabbit, also include chicken. So it’s very important to read labels and also realize that they can make the food you want in the same equipment as proteins you don’t want. That is why I may end up making my own food.
 
#15 ·
Thank you. Although I’m going to use the allergist to help us test for now, and then I will probably just read up and do the rest myself. Ultimately, I need to understand what I’m doing and not rely on someone else. I’m a little leery of using a stranger on the internet, even if they are very good.
 
#18 ·
Not supplements. If you make your own, you need to have the correct amounts of vitamins/minerals in it. Iodine, zinc, copper, etc.

You should be able to work with a legit dietitian to formulate a balanced diet with limited ingredients. And it can be done online. Do you have a teaching hospital near you? Cornell has this offered.
 
#20 ·
I don't understand. Are you going to have a diet formulated with the proper vitamins/minerals added? If you make your own diet, the vitamins/min. will vary depending on what is in food.

I have a spreadsheet with all the required nutrients entered and if I change one thing, the whole thing has to be rebalanced. I'm not fanatical about it but I've spent a lot of time on it to originally figure it out.
 
#22 ·
I think in most part if the dog has no allergies it's good enough. but you will be missing zinc, copper, iodine and maybe can't add things like Oysters. There are some crucial ones that I just can't balance with food. IMO, it is kind of scientific. I would just suggest making a spreadsheet so you can really see the big deficits and the areas where you are way over.
 
#25 ·
I’ve done an allergy food trials. First, talk to your vet. See if there is any labwork they want to run, or any concerns they have.

Second, I used Balance It. You can get buy the regular or plus formula without a prescription. Plus has less taste, as far as I can tell. It blends easier with food. My GSD liked it better.

Your vet can give you a prescription for Rx formulas If s/he has specific concerns, but it isn’t necessary for most dogs.

They have diets you can use as a guide. Take a look. You’ll want to enlarge your diet once you get your core ingredients down.

With an allergy trial, you start with one protein that you think is safe and one carb. If that works, you can stop. Or add another similar protein (like turkey with chicken) and a similar carb (sweet potato with potato).

Here’s the thing. Many people want to build up diets that are varied. It’s a bad idea for our dogs who are prone to allergies.

My GSD ate lamb and rice for years. He had severe poultry and legumes allergies, but he did great on lamb and rice. Then Later in life, he didn’t.

I was able to substitute in low fat beef and potatoes/sweet potatoes because he had not been exposed to beef at all and potatoes very rarely. They were novel foods.

He ate those and occasional pork (once he was diagnosed with hemangiosarcoma and I knew he didn’t have years left) until the end.

With my current pup, he doesn’t do great on chicken. I put him on fish kibble with fish (cod, salmon, capelin and sprat) treats. That’s it.

I’m a huge fan of Balance It. I fed my prior GSD homemade meals for the majority of his life. His labs were good. His coat was plush, shiny, and healthy. His vets were pleased with his muscle mass and overall health.

(I started him on raw but once he couldn’t eat poultry, it just became too hard to ensure his calcium intake was appropriate).

I don’t like winging it. Nutrition is difficult, but it’s too important; there really aren’t other supplements that are designed by veterinary schools to balance homemade diets.

If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a note. ?

Www.balanceit.com
 
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#32 ·
Our epileptic Malinois developed eosinophilia/enlarged spleen earlier this year. We consulted with a vet internist, she did blood-work, ran an ultrasound, aspirated her spleen, and suspected food hypersensitivity. We consulted with a vet nutritionist (which I do not recommend, she was very much against raw diet and made assumptions about her raw diet without even asking us). Anyway, vet nutritionist put her on a cooked lamb (novel protein) + sweet potato + commercial supplement. She was on it for a month, and the eosinophilia resolved (internist says her spleen is plumb and she doesn't see anything wrong with it).

Internist did not want us to gradually add other proteins to her diet (I think it's because our dog has severe epilepsy and she really didn't want to fix anything that wasn't broken). We added cooked pork to her diet in June because the lamb was just too fatty(her anti-seizure medications increase her risk for pancreatitis). Plus she started eating her own poop so I felt she was probably missing something in her diet. She has had two other sets of blood-work since June (at her neurologist) and her eosinophil levels have been normal. We have a follow-up with her internist next week so we will see what she says.
 
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