Kibble suggestions?

[virgini...@gmail.com]

We have been given contrary advise about food. Everything from Nutro to Blue Buffalo to home cooked. I'm having difficulty getting accurate nutritional info for the different brands of dog food. Looking for suggestions on food and/or websites that have nutritional info and ingredients.
Thanks everyone. This is all so upsetting but I don't feel so alone in this anymore. Brian and I never heard of a dog getting hepatitis until Cassie's diagnosis.

[Arwyn Todd]

Hi Virginia,

Deciding on food can be very complicated, which is especially hard since it's so crucial for management of CAH and copper storage. When we were looking for a commercial food, I emailed the manufacturers directly for their nutritional information. I always included a brief description of our boy's condition so they knew what I was looking for, and they were all very helpful. I even had one company write back telling me none of their foods would be appropriate for a dog with his conditions and recommended some other brands to try.

We ended up going to a veterinary nutritionist to have them build a homemade diet for our boy that took into account all of his medical conditions and his allergies (he's allergic to rice, which most of the low copper recommended foods have). We went directly through our vet so they had access to his medical record and were able to work with her to make sure they weren't missing anything. It was incredibly helpful and we've been home cooking his food for a year and half now without a problem. It's more work than kibble, but has definitely been worth it for our boy. The company we used is PetDiets, and the reason we found them was because they'd gone to graduate school with our vet. His diet does require a powder supplement called BalanceIt that we mix in (I call it his multi-vitamin) to make sure he gets all the nutrients he needs.

Hopefully that helps. I know other people here have had good success with some of the commercial diets and might have more information for you about that route.

Good luck!

Arwyn

[bjbla...@gmail.com]

Hi Arwyn. I was looking up the Balance It that you mentioned as I'm sure I will be needing to do home cooking as soon as I get Easys final biopsy report for his copper storage level. I noticed there is copper in the vitamins lists of ingredients. Is that ok? Or is it going to be impossible to find everything we need to feed our dogs without copper? Thanks for your help. Barb

[Arwyn Todd]

Hi Barb,

It's true, there is some copper in most of the BalanceIt formulas. They did just come out with a copper free version a couple of months ago. However, when I asked the nutritionists about reformulating our boy's diet to use the new version, they said the copper free version does not have taurine, which is helpful for the liver and, more importantly, that some copper is required for the body to process normally and Tucker is already at the minimum copper intake. With that information, we decided to keep him on the Feline-K version that has the lowest amount of copper of all of their formulas (before the copper free version came out) and the additional taurine.

The other thing to know about BalanceIt is it requires veterinary approval to purchase and to get dosing information for. We got Tucker's homemade diet recipe + BalanceIt prescription from PetDiets at petdiets.com and they were great. Our vet worked with them directly, sending them all of Tucker's medical information so they could formulate his diet around all of his medical conditions (we're "lucky" enough to have more than just CAH to deal with). The reason we picked them was because our vet went to school with one of the vets there so she trusted them, which was a good enough recommendation for me. I don't remember how much it cost, as we did it a couple of years ago.

Hope that all helps Barb. Let me know if you have any other questions. Good luck!