gastrointestinal

Although food allergies are quite uncommon, they can sometimes occur in dogs and cats that have year-round skin issues (not seasonal) or chronic gastrointestinal problems.  Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to diagnosis them.  Blood or saliva tests may be appealing as an easy way to diagnose food allergy, but they are highly inaccurate so don’t waste your money on them!  The only way to diagnose a food allergy is with elimination diet trial.  To do an elimination diet trial, you must feed your pet ONLY a veterinary diet specifically designed for elimination diet trials for the prescribed period of time. Before you consider doing an elimination diet trial to diagnose food allergy, you should know up front that they are not easy (you’ll see why as you read on), so you don’t want to go through it more than once. Most veterinary specialists recommend an elimination diet trial of at least 8-12 weeks for pets with skin issues and 3-4 weeks for those with digestive issues.  Therefore, my philosophy is to make sure that the trial is carefully done with the right diet, for the right length of time, and without making common mistakes.  That way, if your pet’s symptoms improve, then your pet may have a food allergy (there are more steps to take), but if your pet doesn’t get significantly better during an elimination diet trial, food allergy is even less likely to be the cause of your pet’s problem and you can move on to other, more likely causes of skin or digestive issues. Elimination diet options There are two main approaches to the diet used for an elimination diet trial: Novel ingredient diets A novel ingredient diet is one that contains ingredients your pet has never eaten before.  They aren’t inherently less allergenic – they’re just…

Read More