If your dog is having skin problems, stop sticking to the same old food!

One of the easiest ways to improve your dog’s skin allergies.


You may already know that one of the best ways to get rid of your pet’s skin problems is through a diet change. 

And I agree it’s easier said than done, even if your dog’s perfectly fine. 

I still remember being in the pet shop for the first time, tasked to buy dried dog food for my Maltese; I was confronted with a dozen of different brands of kibbles (thankfully, I was in a smaller pet shop). 

Looking through all the brands, I spent nearly an hour in the shop, and it was exhausting trying to compare the minute differences. 

In the end, I went for something that was within my mid-range budget, with the longest ingredient list. I paid for the food and walked out of the store with a spring in my step, still feeling proud that I’d unlocked the ‘Savvy Shopper’ achievement – getting the most stuff for the least price possible.

I’m sure you have had the same experience, and these days, it seems more challenging.

“If you can’t convince them, confuse them.”

Don’t you think that the adage is even more pronounced in recent times? I was shopping for bedsheets, and every year they seem to be able to attach new terms to similar products – Pima, Sateen, Jacquard, Maillard (Just kidding, but who knows?).

It’s not just daily products. I’m even having problems keeping up with all the new pet products that are on the market and finding myself figuring out what’s good and what’s not.

Why do I bother? The right diet is the best way to help owners with their dog’s health issues – especially skin problems.

The good news is that no matter how fancy dog food gets, the fundamentals never change. 

Back to the basics

I’ve helped many owners with their dog’s skin problems, and here are three tips I always share that will make things easier and increase your odds of success.

  1. Choose a good food
  2. Fewer ingredients mean a lesser chance of allergies
  3. Every dog is different. Try until you succeed

1. Choose A Good Food

No one can promise you a brand to solve your dog’s skin problems. You can only increase the odds by selecting good quality food.

But what does it mean by good quality?

Given the amount of competition going on, there’s a lot of confusion. 

Here are some tips I would like to offer you:

  • To oversimplify things, identify the brands sold in supermarkets and stay away.
  • There are some brands whose prices are suspiciously low (costs as little as supermarket brands).
  • Check if the ingredients are specific.
  • Corn should preferably be avoided. 
  • Avoid products that use BHT or BHA as preservatives. 
  • Don’t get fooled by fancy ingredients. 

Here’s a detailed explanation of why supermarket brands are inferior.  

However, good quality food doesn’t need to cost you an arm, nor does it mean having a long list of fanciful ingredients. The items in the ingredients list are arranged in order of weight, so the first few ingredients, usually meat and carbohydrates, make up the bulk of the kibble.

In some brands, ingredients are ambiguous. Beware if the manufacturer uses terms like ‘Meat meal,’ ‘Animal fat,’ or ‘Poultry fat.’ Who knows what meat or animals they’ve used?

Secondly, although corn seems healthy, there’s a long controversy behind them. Not only because they are cheap but it’s also mostly genetically modified. I can’t go into them now, but manufacturers aren’t short of alternatives, and neither will you find yourself short of choices. 

As for BHT and BHA, they are preservatives that are linked to causing cancer. Common natural alternatives include Tocopherols (Vitamin E) or rosemary extract.

Don’t be fooled

Ingredients in the middle and end of the list make up only a tiny amount of the food. To know if the celery and spinach are merely dusting on a plate, identify where the animal fat is listed.

Can you see where ‘Poultry Fat’ is highlighted? Ingredients listed after that may only be in tiny quantities.

 

 

The reason is that kibbles are usually sprayed with a layer of animal fats to increase their palatability, listed in the first few ingredients. You surely don’t see kibbles dripping in fat, so the ingredients listed after that are like salt and pepper on your steak.

Action Steps:

  • Stay away from kibbles with the following ingredients:
    • Unspecified sources of ingredients e.g., Meat/poultry meal 
    • Chemical preservatives (BHA / BHT)
    • Corn 
    • Flavoring and coloring
  • If you see the brand at a supermarket, don’t buy it.
  • If it’s way cheaper than other brands, don’t buy it.

 

2. Fewer Ingredients Means Lesser Chance of Allergies

Harmless as some ingredients may seem, we have no idea what your pet is allergic to. Even though allergy tests will give you a good idea of the kind of food to stay away from, the results can be inconclusive.

That’s the reason why if your dog is suffering from allergies, a fail-safe, though tedious way, is to put your dog on an exclusion diet, where the dog is fed with only a few varieties of ingredients and slowly introduced to other ingredients to observe the body’s response to them.

Not everything good for us will benefit your pet.

We love to know that we’re feeding nutritious herbs, fruits and vegetables when choosing kibbles for our furry friends, but as mentioned earlier, they’re just not available in substantial quantities to provide any benefit.

Not only that, the additional ingredients may be the reason behind your pet’s allergies.

However, rarely do dogs have such severe allergies that they need to go through the hassles of an exclusion diet. Many dogs I’ve worked with can see improvements after changing to kibbles with limited ingredients.

Dog food with limited ingredients usually comprises a single meat protein, a few carbohydrate sources, and a few varieties of vegetables and will help reduce the odds of exposing your dogs to allergens (some brands have 10 – 20 different types of fruits and vegetables in their kibbles!).

If you see an improvement, you may add in some healthy, low-allergy-risk foods if you wish, adding in one new ingredient every week. Yogurt, kefir, and steamed or pureed leafy vegetables are great choices but beware of human food that’s toxic to dogs.

Action Steps:

  • Put your pet on a limited-ingredient diet first, which also means no treats :(
  • Add one new ingredient every week and observe if your dog’s skin acts up
  • If your dog seems to be allergic to a particular ingredient, remove it.

 

3. Every dog is different. Try until you succeed.

Although it’s common to see improvements on your first diet change, some dogs may require you to switch around a few brands.

Here are some more tips on how to do that:

Do your evaluation. Don’t depend on hearsay.

Don’t have a preconceived notion of certain ingredients if you haven’t done allergen tests. It doesn’t mean chicken is bad or your dog has to go grain-free. Who knows if your dog is allergic to potatoes instead? For example, my dog’s allergic to lamb and fish but not chicken. Besides, chicken formulas are still very popular with pet owners. 

It doesn’t mean that what people say will be bad, including me.

Price is not an indication of quality.

An iPhone is more expensive than most smartphones, but it doesn’t mean it’s the best. It depends on what the user needs and what they’re comfortable with.

It’s the same for dog food. Although prices can vary slightly, brands you can find in supermarkets will be much cheaper. On the other end of the spectrum, commercial raw diets are usually the most expensive because of the high meat content. Most premium kibble brands are priced in the middle.  

At the end of the day, it still depends on what your dog’s requirements are. If it’s sensitive to a high protein/high meat content diet, feeding your dog expensive high protein diets is only going to make matters worse.

Be willing to try everything.

Try until you succeed. Let your creativity flow, and trust yourself. After all, you’re spending the most time with your dog and trust yourself to evaluate if whatever you’re doing is working or not. Here are some options you can try:

  • Canned food
  • Home cooked food
  • Commercial raw diets
  • Home-prepared raw diets
  • Different protein, exotic protein if need be
  • Carbohydrates free (no sweet or starchy vegetables like potatoes, carrots, yam, etc.)
  • Go vegetarian if necessary.

If you don’t try, you’ll never know. Good luck!

“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.” – René Descartes

 

Summary

We are what we put into our mouths, and the same applies to your dog. The body has an amazing ability to heal itself, and our job is to give the body what it needs to heal.  Good quality food nurtures the body and will help to prevent illnesses by strengthening the immune system. 

However, most of the time, we don’t know what’s causing our dog’s allergies. So start with as little as possible and work up from there. The fruits and vegetables in dog food are usually in tiny quantities and may be the cause of your dog’s allergic reactions.

Finally, don’t give up just because changing one brand doesn’t help. I’ve helped many owners with their dog’s skin problems, and they’ve always been patient and strict with the program. Try until you see results.

Up Next

Now that you’ve learned about how to utilize diet change to improve your dog’s skin problem, we’ll look at some of the jargon used by pet food. I’d also give my recommendations on what you should look out for in the diet to increase your odds of solving your dog’s skin problems. 

 

P.S. If you find this article useful, remember to share!

Finally, there are too many dogs suffering from skin allergies, and more dog owners need to know about more natural and lasting alternatives to solving skin problems. You can help! On behalf of all the dogs in the world, Thank you!

 

How to Choose the Proper Pet Food

So often, I have customers coming in clueless about what brands of pet food to choose, often confused by the myriad of brands available and conflicting feedback from people.

Many may disagree with me but what matters most is that your pet has a healthy appetite and eats willingly anything they’re not allergic to, given at the right proportion. Animals who usually remain healthy and live until a ripe old age seem to be fed a good variety of food rather than a strict diet.

Although there are people who feed their dogs low to mid-range kibbles all their lives and never suffer from anything serious, it’s akin to saying that there are many healthy old people who still smoke cigarettes at the age of 80, and therefore, tobacco does you no harm.

Better diets will improve lives.

Ask and look around, and you’ll see more animals developing physiological and psychological problems than before. This is because many purebred pets we see today are badly bred from puppy mills – Animals with character flaws like aggression or genetic problems are allowed to breed indiscreetly. Also, to reduce operating costs, most are poorly nourished, and as a result, pets you find in pet shops have not benefited from a healthy, wholesome head start which is so critical for their future development.

But even if they’re born with problems, a proper diet will help make up for the poor start and rebuild their immune system.

Superficial issues always surface because of internal imbalances. With a healthier diet, the most obvious signs you would see if your pet responds well to the diet are better skin, brighter eyes, cleaner ears, and thicker hair. But how does one define what’s good and not? You’ve seen categories like Active, Fit, Senior, Breed Specific Diets, Limited Ingredients, Grain Free, Hypoallergenic Diets, and BARF – why do they need this much differentiation, and which one to choose?

To me, where and how they source their raw materials and what they put in them is more important than what they’re called and how much they cost.

My Criteria

It doesn’t mean that the longer the ingredients list, the better the product is. Let me give you a simple example: Most supplements require taking one to two tablets to achieve the right dosage. So let’s just say if we have a meal replacement product that has all the essential nutrients, multivitamins, a correct proportion of vegetables and fruits, supplements to improve joint health and digestive health, an array of herbs to improve general well-being, you’ll be looking at a huge meal to consume everything at the right dosage. That said, it doesn’t mean that a product with a long ingredient list is bull, but rather, you shouldn’t discount a product just because it has limited ingredients.

Secondly, I wondered why so many people realized that feeding their pets chicken would result in allergic reactions. Although there isn’t a definitive answer yet, but a chicken usually takes 4 months to mature naturally, but only a month in modern farms. How it’s being altered to achieve that, I do not know, but the amount of antibiotics used on livestock is ridiculous.

All these alterations made to produce weaken the body and, at the same time, strengthens bacteria and viruses. And to put the body back in balance, choose meat product that has been sourced from responsible farms. Everybody can add fancy stuff inside their diets and boast about optimal levels of protein, but if the quality of the product is questionable, you’re just feeding your pets optimal levels of poison.

Other things to note 

There have been arguments that a high protein diet could lead to or worsen kidney diseases and raise uric acid levels due to protein metabolism. My simple suggestion is to stay on the safe side and choose a formula with a protein level of around 30-35%. Besides, more protein does not indicate that it’s a good product! Our fingernails, hair, and skin are all protein, but it isn’t a good source, isn’t it? The best way to prevent that and many other illnesses is to make sure that your pet has enough water so that the body has enough fluids to flush kidney stone-forming substances and other toxins out of the body.

It is also imperative that your pet has enough exercise as it will help the body utilize the nutrients and function well, especially with a high-nutrient diet. Goodness unspent and not utilized will do more harm than good.

Any particular brands that I should choose?

I know you’re waiting for this, and the short answer is: No. But I offer some brands I think are not bad and for different budgets.

If you’re here reading this, you have a good idea that education is the key to taking good care of our body and mind. The same goes for food that nourishes your pet. Rather than spending hours on Zalora choosing that perfect dress, take half an hour just to go through some of the websites of brands that have crossed your mind. Don’t bother reading about their manufacturing process and what they put inside because if we are talking about better brands, most of them don’t differ much from each other.

Rather, find out where they have sourced their food from. But in all honesty, food manufacturers, be it food for personal consumption or pets, can say so much yet mean so little. Like politicians, most of the time, labels are just pure confusing.

Since most pet foods are from the United States, here are some commonly used food labeling and what they really mean.

Therefore, as mentioned in the beginning, it’s always a good idea to provide variety in one’s diet. Different vegetables provide different vitamins, and different pet food brands are formulated differently and provide different amounts of nutrients. Staying with one brand or formula may cause a deficiency in the long run.

So change around every few months; how often really depends on the individual pet. For a fussy eater, rotating food when you have not managed its choosy behavior may worsen its habits.

My next article will discuss raw diets if you have the time and want the best for your pets.