Hypoallergenic Foods for Your Dogs – Is It Good?

In medicine doctors look for two things, signs and symptoms. Simply speaking, signs are things that another person can see and symptoms are thing the patient feels that aren't necessarily apparent to an observer. Humans help their doctors by carefully describing their symptoms. Unfortunately, your dog can't communicate his symptoms to you or the vet. Therefore it's sometimes hard to determine if your dog has an allergy or is so what is causing it.

A few signs that dogs show, just like humans with allergies, are pretty common. Sneezing, watery eyes, running noses and scratching are easy to see. Somewhat less obvious are stomach problems loss of appetite and breathing problems. If you notice any of these things the first thing to suspect as a culprit is some sort of food allergy, especially if you have recently switched to a new brand of food.

Once you suspect a food allergy, the next step is to isolate the exact cause. This is hard in humans and can be extremely frustrating in animals. Often allergy related signs and symptoms take weeks to go away after the allergen is eliminated from the diet. But it can be done through careful observation and careful planning.

One method is to put your dog on a hypoallergenic dog food. Once the dog is free of any allergic signs and symptoms, you will begin to reintroduce previous foods one at a time in an attempt to determine the exact culprit. Try to be as specific as possible in the foods you add. For instance instead of adding a dog food that is corn based, simply add a little corn to the dog's diet and watch for problems. Go slowly and give each new food time to cause problems before moving on to the next. Also, when you have eliminated one food, stop feeding it to your dog before trying the next one since the allergy may be caused by a combination of products.

Just because your dog has been eating the same food for a long time without problems, don't rule out a food based allergy if problems suddenly pop up. Allergies often show up out of the blue, especially later in life. If this is the case, follow the method above to test for allergies.

Though your vet can test for some frequent allergies, this is often expensive and in the long run is less effective than food based testing. A dog may only be allergic to one brand of food and not to an entire food source in general.