Pet Food Bad Reactions

In our first blog, we looked at dog food and allergies and what can happen to dogs when they react to food. We saw three types of reaction; allergy, sensitivity and intolerance. Allergy is an immediate response like a bee sting. Sensitivity is a delayed response like bloating or diarrhoea after 24-48 hours. Food intolerance can look similar to a delayed response but doesn’t involve the immune system as much. All affect either the skin (and/or ears, rears and feet) or the gut or both. All include disruption of the gut bugs, the intestinal microbiome. 

Human Food Allergy

Today we’ll dive deeper into allergy, the most dramatic and potentially fatal unwanted reaction to foods or additives we feed to our pets. 

In humans, food allergy (think peanuts on a plane, or wheat gluten in coeliac disease) runs at 1-2% of all UK adults, and 5-8% of children. These figures are unknown for dogs and cats (we have no central NHS database). 

Rates of allergy are increasing in people, especially in industrialised societies like the UK and US. Interestingly, they are more likely in built-up urban areas than in country folk in these countries. People moving from low allergy countries like Japan and Indonesia have even higher rates of allergy than their new neighbours when moving to first world countries. 

In us humans, the reason for worsening allergy numbers is not known. Increased hygiene, lack of vitamin D and lack of exposure to foods at weaning might be to blame. 

Dog Food and Allergies

The figures for pets vary widely. In the general dog population, it might be about 2%, the same as in adult humans, which makes sense. But among itchy animals, allergy can be as much as one in four! 

Milk, eggs, peanuts, nuts (walnuts, almonds, brazil’s etc.), sesame, fish and shellfish are the top allergens in humans. In pets, we don’t see these as allergens as problems, thank goodness. We see good old wheat, beef and chicken at the top of the list, and as any meat protein becomes rarer, the lower it is on the list. So alligator meat, that I have actually seen, really is low on the allergen list. Why? Because wheat beef and chicken have been used by food corporations since the ’50s and ’60s in their tinned and kibbled ultra-processed food offerings. ‘Top breeders recommend it because it’s solid nourishment’, remember that one? 

So we don’t really know how much allergy there is, and we can’t do much to avoid it. What can we do? Well, if we look at the potential causes of allergies in humans, we can work on that. 

Raw food contains bugs, good bugs as well as low, immunising levels, of harmful bugs. This is a good thing as far as the ‘hygiene hypothesis’ of allergy goes. And our experience bears this out because raw dogs usually show fewer allergies than kibble dogs. Raw food contains good levels of vitamin D if liver and fish oils are used. It seems wise to expose pups to a variety of food, in blocks of about a week or so, for their first six months. This practice educates their gut immunity on real proteins to reduce food reactivity later in life. 

Raw foods, I find, tend to be generally less allergenic than kibbles and tins. They provoke less microbiome disruption and reduce the likelihood of Leaky Gut issues. 

I can’t see why more people don’t move over to a well-balanced range of raw complete food.