- The Benefits Of Making Homemade Dog Food For Treating Allergies
- ChefPaw Recipes For Dogs With Allergies
- Need Help With Other Dietary Restrictions?
- Custom Recipes
If you’re concern your dog is having allergic reactions to their food or needs help with a food allergy, a switch to a homemade fresh diet is a fantastic option. Homemade diets can feature a delightful range of human-grade foods that are perfect for supporting dogs with allergies.
Not only can you control all the ingredients that go into their meals (extremely important for avoiding hidden allergens), you can give your dog a more nutritional diet that’s more closely tailored to their needs. When you use ChefPaw, the pet food maker, it’s surprisingly more affordable to create these wholesome allergy-free meals at home than buying their commercial counterparts.
The Benefits Of Making Homemade Dog Food For Treating Allergies
Along with offering your dog all the benefits a fresh whole foods diet created at home can give them over commercial options, there are several benefits it can provide dogs struggling with allergies.
1. Great For Diagnosing Allergies
From avoiding hidden ingredients commercial dog foods conveniently love leaving off the label to eliminating preservatives and dyes research has found can cause allergies, having full control over every ingredient is unmatched.
This makes homemade dog food a logical choice for running the elimination diet, which can start with a single protein and carbohydrate source. As we learned in Common Food Allergies In Dogs, the elimination diet is the best method by far for diagnosing allergies and the allergens behind them. Once that allergen is found, we can slowly start adding more and more beneficial ingredients back into their meals.
2. A More Affordable Way To Treat Allergies
When you create your dog’s meals at home, you can tailor their meals to avoid specific allergens. Then you can elevate their meals even more by incorporating ingredients and supplements that give your dog a nutritional boost, supporting their immune system, digestion, and skin & coat health. When shopping for commercial dog food that can provide that kind of quality, you’re not going to be a happy camper when you see the price.
Before ChefPaw, there wasn’t an affordable and easy-to-use home dog food cooker machine that could tailor its recipes to your dogs’ needs while still giving you a nutritional breakdown of the meals. This made giving our dogs homemade food, especially when they needed a diet that addressed a medical condition, too demanding for most pet parents. This helped create a monopoly on commercial dog foods. Where they were free to charge exorbitant prices for specialty foods due to there being no other option. Thankfully, this is no longer the case.
3. Fresh, High-Quality, And Minimally-Processed Ingredients
Allergies can limit foods rich in essential vitamins and minerals that your dog can eat. This means it’s imperative that the ingredients they can eat are delivering all the nutrients they had when harvested. This means fresh ingredients that haven't sat around, losing their original nutritional value. This also means they should be only minimally processed via gentle cooking processes. This promotes high nutrient retention and makes it easier for a dog’s body to absorb nutrients.
4. Improved Digestibility
In addition to promoting superior nutrient retention, gently cooked dog food vs. raw is often gentler on sensitive stomachs. This can help reduce gastrointestinal issues like gas, bloating, constipation, and loose stools. While we often associate allergies with causing skin issues, they can take their toll on your dog’s digestive system, especially when it’s a food allergy vs. another type of allergy.
Along with symptoms such as stomach pain, diarrhea, and undesired weight loss, allergies can disrupt your dog’s microbiome. This can lead to everything from the inability to absorb nutrients to behavioral issues.
Thankfully, with homemade diets, we can easily support our dog’s digestive health by including anti-inflammatory foods like omega-3 fatty acids, leafy greens, and high-fiber fruits and vegetables.
5. Supports Long-Term Allergy Management
Not only can having control over the ingredients that go into our dogs’ meals help diagnose their allergies, but homemade dog food supports long-term allergy management. This can help reduce flair-ups that can occur for several reasons. For example, a company may change its recipe without alerting their customers. It also reduces cross-contamination risks, which can happen when multiple food products are produced in the same factory. This peace of mind is something no commercial pet food brand, delivery service or otherwise, can give you.
Even better, when you can make your dog’s food for them at home, you can give them a more diverse diet that features an abundance of beneficial human-grade ingredients. This is beneficial for reducing the likelihood of a new allergy appearing as dogs with allergies are more prone to them. Overexposure to the same ingredients all the time is one of the most common ways to promote food allergies.
Below, you’ll find a variety of specialty recipes that ChefPaw can make for your best buddy that are designed to alleviate allergies. Many of these recipes can be paired together, giving your dog a more diverse and healthy diet.
ChefPaw Recipes For Dogs With Allergies
ChefPaw comes with several recipes designed to combat allergies. Within these recipes, you’ll see different ingredients removed at various rates to combat the various degrees of allergies.
Thanks to ChefPaw’s nutritional analyzer, which updates a meal's nutritional value when an ingredient is exchanged for another, any of its recipes can be adjusted. This allows all of ChefPaw’s homemade dog food recipes to become ones that support a dog with allergies. This is particularly helpful if your dog needs help with another medical condition in addition to allergies.
1. Chunky Turkey & White Rice (The Ranchers Dog)
With chicken and beef accourting accounting for nearly half of all food allergy cases, swapping them out for turkey, a novel protein (new to your dog) is often all that’s needed. But by making a few more changes, leaving out eggs, corn, and soy, Chunky Turkey & White Rice eliminates the most common allergens.
Research indicates these common food allergens account for 98% of food allergies our dogs all too often struggle with. This is a perfect recipe when the traditional elimination diet needs to be avoided due to concerns about malnutrition.
2. Novel Bison Protein & Rice (Le Gordon Blue)
Featuring a less traditional protein, Novel Bison & Rice is free from the most common protein allergies. Just because your dog has an allergy doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy rich and diverse meals. With this recipe, you can delight your dog's senses with naturally sweet honey, crunchy carrots, tender spinach, and hearty pumpkin, superfoods that go far in supporting their health.
The best thing about grass-fed bison is it’s not just a way to combat allergies, it brings an ample and nourishing serving of essential nutrients. Compared to traditionally-raised beef, bison has 25% fewer calories despite having 2 grams more protein and slightly higher zinc levels.
3. Novel Bison Protein & Quinoa (Le Gordon Blue Part Deux)
It’s not uncommon for vets to recommend a less extreme version of the elimination diet, especially when allergies or another condition are affecting your dog’s ability to consume and utilize all the nutrients they need. This can also be the case if a grain allergy is suspected.
To run a less extreme version of the elimination diet, we can combine a novel protein like bison with an assortment of anti-allergy-promoting fruits and veggies like quinoa, spinach, and blueberries. And that’s exactly what Novel Bison Protein & Quinoa does! Perfect for an 8-10 week trial.
Grain-free meals can help prevent rapid fluctuation in blood sugar (good for dogs struggling with arthritis), so make sure to ask your vet if this recipe is a better option if you have concerns about the traditional elimination diet.
4. Allergy Care with Turkey and Sweet Potato (Gordon's Grub)
With Allergy Care with Turkey and Sweet Potato, give your dog a rich and diverse diet while avoiding the most common allergy triggers. Turkey is a perfect option when your dog needs a novel protein. Not only is it easier to find than other less common protein sources, it’s a considerably more affordable option than beef.
Featuring low-histamine foods like quinoa (thought to reduce histamine that promotes itching), this recipe pairs perfectly with our next. Remember, diversifying your dog’s meal is important for discouraging new allergies from occurring.
5. Allergy Care With Turkey and Rice (Gordon's Grub)
Combining broccoli for counteracting allergies via AhR modulation and apples for its rich source of quercetin (a natural antihistamine), Allergy Care With Turkey and Rice is a science-packed recipe. But the science doesn’t stop there!
We additionally included canned pumpkin, one of the best prebiotic sources for feeding good bacteria for supporting a dog’s microbiome. Then there’s honey! Honey doesn’t just taste great, it has natural enzymes that aid digestion along with antioxidants that can protect the immune system from bacteria, viruses, and parasites when it’s fighting an allergy.
Need Help With Other Dietary Restrictions?
ChefPaw also provides suggested recipes for help with specialty diets. This includes help with kidney disease (renal diet) along with diets that support all the various life stages (Puppy, Adult, & Senior). Each of these recipes has been meticulously formulated based on the best research available to give your dog the support they need.
Custom Recipes
Whether your pet has unique nutritional needs or you simply want expert guidance, ChefPaw gives you access to our Certified Veterinary Food Technician, Dr. Fusch. Offering personalized nutritional consultations, Dr. Fusch will create custom recipes that are uniquely your dogs. Now that’s what we call recipes truly tailored for a dog’s specific health needs. Please note that if your pet has a medical condition, you'll have refer to a Board-Certified Veterinary Nutritionist.