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Homemade Dog Food: Food Allergies and Pancreatitis

March 15th, 2011

This is the third post in our series of Dog Food Dish Q&As with people who make their own pet food. KB and her dogs “K” and “R” are best known for their mountain biking and hiking adventures in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Thanks to motion-activated wildlife cameras, good hands-on photography, and wilderness sleuthing, their blog Romping and Rolling in the Rockies also features incredible wildlife images.

What’s most intriguing about this homemade pet food story is that in the case of K … it’s truly a life-and-death situation. From puppyhood, this now 7-year-old, purebred, chocolate lab has suffered terrible dog food allergies. Then, she developed pancreatitis after eating (and getting poisoned by) wild mushrooms.

A second pancreatitis emergency changed EVERYTHING about how this active, smart, sensitive dog will eat for the rest of her life.

K is also famous for only having three toes on one of her front feet. A a virulent bone infection in 2010 required amputation. She is doing great now.

KB and K live with another purebred lab, R, who is 3 years old now. (He eats kibble.)

"K," photo borrowed from Romping and Rolling in the Rockies (a life with dogs and wildlife blog)

QUESTION: Why and when did you switch to homemade dog food?
It was somewhere in her first year of life. As a puppy, K  had diarrhea that we just could not get rid of. It just went on, and on, and on, and on. And, we tried a whole lot of different kinds of foods, and very gradually put it together that she was having a lot of difficulty with digesting grains.

I found a couple of foods … back then there were not as many commercial options, good commercial options, as there are now. I found a couple of foods that were at least low grain, if not grain free, but it seemed as if she would start out OK on them but then get sick again.

So, basically I had this puppy who wasn’t gaining any weight like she was supposed to, and I was getting more and more frustrated with it. My vet had been saying quietly over many months, “You might try a homemade diet.” She would say it very quietly, sort of inserted it into my brain. And, I’d think, “That would be a lot of work. Let’s try to find another commercial food.”

We kept trying and trying, and she finally sat me down and said, “I’ve seen cases like this before. We don’t really know for sure what’s in every one of the commercial foods that you’ve tried. If you feed her a homemade diet, we will know exactly what she’s eating. We can manipulate it, and we can figure out what she can handle and what she can’t handle.” And, that was how I started.

QUESTION: Did you work with a veterinary nutritionist?
Not at that point. At that point, I worked with my vet, and we figured out a diet that worked K her based on my vet’s guidelines. My vet had us feeding certain supplements to make sure K got the right nutritional balance, and I don’t remember exactly what those supplements were now.

I believe bone meal powder was a big part of it because we needed to make sure she was getting enough calcium, and that’s something that’s supplemented in commercial dog foods.

So, K was doing great. We got her on this homemade food. She was just doing awesome, and then she had a big insult to her pancreas when she got mushroom poisoning. We thought it was a one-time thing. We thought she was all better after the poisoning was over, and she was out of the woods … until about two years ago, when we went on vacation, and my vet said, “You should be fine feeding a commercial food for a couple of weeks while you’re on vacation so that you don’t have to be hauling around all this homemade food with you.”

And, while K was on the commercial food, and we were away on vacation, I started to notice that her belly seemed really sore. In fact, I pressed on her belly once, and she bit me, and you know K.

[Readers, I actually know K personally. I can tell you, K would NEVER lash out at anyone, unless she was in pain.]

So, we got home, and she ended up in the hospital about a week later with a really bad case of pancreatitis.

QUESTION: How did the second bout with pancreatitis change things?
It was at that point that my vet said, “You know, this is getting out of my league. There is this board certified veterinary nutritionist at Angell Memorial hospital who does telephone consults. I’ll fax her all of K’s records, and you’ll have some phone consultations and figure out a diet for K.”

Essentially my vet suspected that over all those years between the mushroom poisoning and the next pancreatitis episode, K had actually had “smoldering pancreatitis” – they call it – so it had actually been there, but we just hadn’t been seeing the symptoms.

So, that’s when I went to the Angell Memorial vet, who formulated a diet that K has done really great on. She has been on that diet for about a year and a half now.

QUESTION: So what’s in this special homemade dog food K eats?
It’s three things:

1. The vast majority is yams.
2. And, then the next biggest ingredient is oatmeal.
3. Then she only gets a teeny bit of meat per day – 60 grams a day split over two meals.

QUESTION: What kind of protein do you feed?
I feed beef that’s raised by my next-door neighbor, so it’s grass-fed, not certified organic, but I see these cows out there all the time. I know they’re not being injected with hormones and all that kind of stuff. It’s very low-fat beef. Apparently grass-fed beef is similar to venison in fat levels.

QUESTION: You cook the homemade dog food, yes?
We cook it, yes. We start by preparing the beef. Even though the beef is very low fat, because of K’s pancreatitis, we have to prepare it in such a way that we burn off as much of the fat as we can and are left with as pure a protein as we can get.

We kind of roast it, and the fat falls down below this grill on the bottom. We lift the remaining beef out. We prepare big batches of beef that way and then freeze it. So we have all these little containers of beef in the freezer.

When we’re ready to make a batch of dog food, we pull out one of those frozen containers.

QUESTION: Are you a big home cook, or is this a big deal for you?
I’m actually not a cook at all. At all. [My husband] does all of the cooking. I hate cooking. It’s part of why when the vet would say, “You can do a homemade diet,” that I would say, “No, we’ve got to find another option.”

QUESTION: Describe your time commitment to making homemade dog food.
In terms of time, we split up the cooking of K’s food because I can no longer lift the pot. With 22 pounds of yams in it, it’s more than I’m allowed to lift.

[KB has had several spinal surgeries over the years to manage a degenerative condition.]

We do peel the yams because they are not organic. My husband is super fast with it. He does that part.

I spend maybe 45 minutes a week preparing the beef. The beef is my part, and he spends maybe 45 minutes a week preparing the food, like putting it all together.

We kind of mash it all up. We found that previously when we didn’t mash up the yams, and sometimes we wouldn’t cook them enough, and K would throw up entire chunks of yams, so we made the rule that we mash them and that way we know they are cooked well enough that she doesn’t throw them up.

QUESTION: How much do you spend on your homemade dog food ingredients?
We buy a whole cow once a year.

I don’t know what our steady-state is now, but we probably use a half a cow a year, and these are not full-sized cows. They are one year old. I think we spent about $3 a pound, so about $500 this year.

We just get the yams at the grocery store. We’ll ask them to go back and get us a case, a box, and when they go on sale, we go wild. As long as they are down in the basement, and there isn’t one bad one in the batch, they keep really well. We go through them to check for bad ones.

As for the oatmeal, we know we would save money if we went to [a grocery warehouse], but we just have this shopping reaction. Both of us do. We can’t deal. We look at each other like, “Please!” And, we run to the car.

So, we just buy the largest oatmeal containers they have at the regular grocery store.

QUESTION: Are they any mistakes you’d caution people about or any advice you’d give to others?
I think it would be incredibly stupid to try and formulate a diet on your own. I didn’t do that. However, I didn’t have any clue when I started what does a dog need. I mean, who knows? My vet knew what a normal dog needs. My regular vet didn’t even know what a dog like K needs, so I had to go higher up.

QUESTION:  You come from a scientific background, yes?
Yes, I do. Physiological sciences.

QUESTION: Are there any books you’d recommend?
No, I tried to find some, and they were all really “out there.” I’m a physiologist, and I read these books, and I believed that the authors didn’t have any idea what they were talking about. So, I put no faith in them.

There may be better books now. Since I consulted the nutritionist, I have paid absolutely no attention to what’s out there.

QUESTION: What kind of kibble does your other dog eat?
He eats Natural Balance Limited Ingredient. What we wanted to do was to choose a high-quality food for R that would not make K extremely sick if she happened to get some of it. So, in his case, we feed him I believe it’s venison and sweet potato kibble, and so it’s definitely more fat and protein than K can have on a regular basis, but if she gets a little bit of his kibble, it’s no big deal.

QUESTION: Did you ever figure out what K is allergic to?
No, we figured out that she cannot digest certain grains, and one of the ones she cannot digest is rice. It goes right through her undigested, which was very odd because every time she got diarrhea my vet would say, “Give her chicken and rice.” And, so when she was a puppy, we were actually perpetuating the situation. Apparently, it’s extremely rare.

QUESTION: How serious, how important, is it that you stick to this specific homemade dog food diet?
The nutritionist really laid down the law that K could die from this [pancreatitis], and I needed to follow her rules … all the vets were saying to me … That we were now at a point where I needed to consider this to be life or death.

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Tags: beef, dog allergies, dog food allergies, grain allergies, home-cooked dog food, homemade dog food, homemade pet food, low-fat dog food, low-protein dog food, medically necessary, oatmeal, pancreatitis, veterinary nutritionist, yams
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Fat: Dog Food Basics

February 24th, 2010

Let’s not mince words. Fats make food taste better. It’s true for us. It’s true for our dogs. Aside from palatability, though, dietary fats (known as lipids) do many good things inside the body, including:

• Preventing heat and moisture loss
• Protecting major organs
• Supplying essential fatty acids (EFAs)
• Carrying fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E and K)
• Insulating nerve fibers
• Helping to transmit nerve impulses
• Contributing structural components to cell membranes
• Transporting other nutrients across these membranes

Fats (solid form at room temperature) and oils (liquid form at room temperature) get a lot of bad press, but they provide the most concentrated source of food energy. In fact, they’re nearly three times as dense energy-wise as carbohydrates or proteins. Most fats are also more digestible.

Fat Digestion

What’s a little freaky about fats is that they don’t get broken down for digestion the way other nutrients do. Instead, they’re elongated and desaturated (loss of hydrogen atoms) inside the body.

Essential Fatty Acids

Essential Fatty Acids (EFAs) might be the most “famous” of all the kinds of dietary fats. These are the OMEGAs you hear about. They’re called “essential” because in most cases the body cannot synthesize them.

• Omega 3 fatty acids (from alpha-linolenic acid)
• Omega 6 fatty acids (from linoleic acid and arachidonic acid)
• Omega 9 fatty acids (from oleic acid)

Vegetable oils can provide Omega 6s, but certain Omega 3s can only be found in animal fats.

Anti-Inflammatory Properties

Omega 3s, in particular, produce a lower immunological response than Omega 6s and Omega 9s, so when veterinarians are concerned with controlling internal inflammation, they may recommend re-balancing EFA ratios and supplementing a pet’s diet with additional Omega 3s.

Be sure to alert your pet’s doctor if you supplement Omega 3s because they act as a blood thinner, which is important if surgery (emergency or otherwise) is needed.

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Tags: corneal dystrophy, dog, dog food, dog nutrition, fats, low-fat dog food, nutrition, pancreatitis
Posted in Dog Food Basics, K9 Nutrition | 2 Comments »