How Stopping Dog Food Allergies Will Save You Time, Money, and Stress

I can understand why people would go into a big box store and purchase one of the cheapest bags of dog food they can find. With budgets getting tighter, it becomes more and more important for people to save money wherever they can. But in reality, how much is that cheap bag of dog food really costing you?

As dog food companies have tried to become more profitable, some of them have cut corners on ingredients in order to help make this happen. One case of this would be instead of putting expensive meat in their food they might try to include cheaper filler ingredients. This ingredient will satisfy your dog's hunger just like meat, and some dogs don't even have problems with ingredients like corn meal and wheat. Along the way these same companies may include more fat in the product to improve the taste.

Here's the bottom line: some dogs will go through life and never have any immediate problems with cheaper dog food with fillers. They don't have dog food allergies to the grains in their food or other ingredients. So, why is this a problem?

To view this from another angle, feeding our pets a cheaper food with all of these fillers would be akin to you eating fast food every single day for the rest of your life. It may be that you don't notice a difference in one or two days; however, how would you feel after eating nothing but that stuff for an entire week, or even a month? This is very similar to what we're doing to our pets when we give them foods with lots of fillers and byproducts. A lot of dogs can eat these foods without any problems for the first few days or maybe even weeks. They probably even enjoy it because the added fat makes it taste good. But how is it affecting their lives?

What about those dogs that start having dog allergy symptoms after a couple of weeks? They start scratching more and have itches in areas where there weren't any before. This could be caused by different reasons, including fleas, inhalants, and other types of allergens. But, down the road this leads to more serious scratching and possibly even hotspots and ear infections.

Before you know it, it is time to take your good friend back for his yearly checkup at the vet. By this point, he is scratching almost nonstop but you really don’t know why. Your vet has the best intentions and decides to give your dog a steroid shot to rid your dog of the dog food allergy symptoms that are causing him such grief. It's regrettable that this does not stop the underlying cause.

Unfortunately I have seen dogs live through this, and I want to prevent others from suffering. Sometimes that cheap bag of dog food that cost you $20 at a big box store will end up costing you hundreds or even thousands in vet bills down the road.