If your dog appears to have developed a food allergy, the next step is to identify which food or foods are causing your dog’s health issues. To accurately diagnose what food is causing your dog to experience an allergic reaction, you must use a method called the elimination diet. To successfully create an elimination diet, you must stop feeding your dog their normal diet and start them on types of food they have never had before. If your dog has had kibble with chicken, beef, salmon, etc, you will have to find a different kind of meat-based food to give them. You may have to spring for an exotic diet until you can identify the problem foods.
If you don’t want to find an exotic protein option, you could switch to a customized diet like those found from Hungry Bark. The customized and limited-ingredient diets available from Hungry Bark let you monitor exactly what ingredients are going into your dog’s body. Once you know exactly what is in your dog’s diet, you can assess the improvement in their symptoms and overall health in order to move forward from there.
Once your dog’s food allergy symptoms improve, slowly introduce old foods that are suspected to have caused the health issues, one at a time. If your dog has a symptomatic reaction, which can take a few days to a few weeks to appear, then you know he or she has a food allergy to that specific ingredient.
