Hypoallergenic food/treats??

    • Gold Top Dog

    Hypoallergenic food/treats??

    My dog has a red rash on both paws, that she itches occasionaly.  My vet gave me some topical spray (Genesis) to use for a month, but it didn't help.  He just prescribed her an antibiotic for the rash, but said if the rash doesn't go away after the antibiotic course (1 week), then I have to put her on a hypo allergenic dog food for 2months.

     Does anyone have recommendations on hypo-allergenic dog foods and treats?  Right now I'm feeding her Solid Gold Just a wee bit with Bison.

    • Gold Top Dog

    I would definitely switch to a food that has fewer ingredients that she could be allergic to. A few that I would recommend are- Pinnacle Trout & Sweet Potato, Pinnacle Duck & Potato, Wellness Simple Solutions and California Natural.

    • Gold Top Dog

    I use the Natural Balance Duck and Potato. They also make a few other varieties. You can find it at PetCo, so that makes it convenient too.

    • Gold Top Dog

    I forgot about Natural Balance! They have a great line of food for dogs with allergies.

    • Gold Top Dog

     I highly recommend Go Natural Salmon and Oatmeal. Its just about the simplest food you can get----even more so than Natural Balance and Wellness Simple Solutions.

    • Gold Top Dog

    jettababy

     I highly recommend Go Natural Salmon and Oatmeal. Its just about the simplest food you can get----even more so than Natural Balance and Wellness Simple Solutions.

    I'd be interested in trying some other foods. Where can you get Go Natural?

    • Gold Top Dog

    It's a nice food----------here's the store locater page

    http://petcurean.com/dealer_location.php

    • Gold Top Dog

    Monica Segal has a brochure on doing a true elimination diet, and otherwise managing allergies: http://www.monicasegal.com/catalog/product.php?cPath=25_26&products_id=72  As someone with a severely allergic dog, I've read her stuff and she is right on the money.  I wish I'd gone this route eight years ago instead of messing around with commercial products.

    Anyway, the first thing that most allergists (veterinary specialists) recommend is putting your dog on a diet prepared at home that consists of one novel protein source, and one novel carb source.  Then you feed nothing but that for, I think it's two months.  If your dog has been on a healthy diet up to now, she should have plenty of reserves available to make up for such a diet being slightly unbalanced.

    After that, it's up to you how to proceed.  If there was enough of an improvement that you'd want to continue with the simple diet for life, you just have to get a nutritionist to tweak it so that it's balanced - usually with a custom blend of supplements. Or, you can slowly introduce more familiar ingredients one at a time to try to identify what's bothering her.  Or, you can take her to an allergist and get tests run to try to determine what she's sensitive to.  Other than some really good detective work, that's the only way to tell whether she's got allergies to environmental allergens like dust mites and pollen.

    I recommend, whatever you do, start a journal that summarizes your dog's daily symptoms, weather, pollen count, what you fed, anything else you did to her, activities that might affect her (like if you cleaned house or sprayed bugs), anything you can think of to jot down.  Vets love this stuff and it will help you get tons more out of any vet visit on this issue.

    Good luck!