Can you switch from grain free to grain dog food

The Truth About Grain-Free Dog Food: Insights from a Nutrition Expert

The phrase grain-free has become one of the most confusing and debated in the world of dog food in recent years. It was and is often seen as a positive many nutritionists warn against high levels of grains in dog food.

However, in recent years, a growing concern has emerged regarding the potential connection between canine dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) and dogs diets with grain-free foods framed by some as the problem.

As a result, pet parents, believing they are offering their furry companions the best nutrition, find themselves troubled by the notion that their diet could be linked to such a serious disease.

While DCM has various causes, including genetics, medications, and infections, its crucial to note theres no scientific evidence definitively linking grain-free or grain-inclusive diets to DCM.

This, however, has not eased the concern or confusion among many pet parents. Not least because people confuse food advertised as grain-free which often has grain substitutes with food that simply has no grains in it, such as raw dog food.To address the uncertainties around foods labelled grain-free, we spoke Dr. Richard Patton, a seasoned Ph.D. animal nutritionist with over 40 years of experience and expertise in formulating canine diets, more than 25 scientific publications to his name, and who has authored a book on pet nutrition. Hes a nutritional consultant for the raw food community.

(Please note that these are Dr. Pattons expert opinions, not those of Dog Food Advisor.)

In the popular language of the pet food industry, grain-free trade signifies the absence of ingredients like corn, oats, wheat, soybeans, and the like. This labelling suggests the replacement of these perceived problematic grains with supposedly more benign options such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, or other non-grain alternatives.

However, the crux of the issue isnt the specific grains name but rather the quantity of soluble carbohydrates it contains essentially, starch and sugar. Potatoes, often deemed virtuous replacements for grains, can be just as carbohydrate-rich and, therefore, pose similar concerns as grains like corn. Similarly, a diet featuring lower levels of soluble carbohydrates can still be highly nutritious, even if it includes moderate amounts of grains.

How do I know if my dog should be grain-free?

Your dog should generally be fed a diet that is low in starch and sugar. Their diet should be low in soluble carbohydrates its usually easiest to feed your dog complete and balanced meat-based dog food.

Apart from honey, there are very few natural sources of food that are high in carbohydrates. If we were to survive in the wild, we would find many things to eat, but very few carbohydrates. Mankind made them easy to find, but a high-carb diet is ill-suited for our genetic machinery.

Should pet parents avoid grain-free food?

The thing to avoid is a high-carb diet. The pet food industry is dominated by brands that make crunchy kibble on a machine called an extruder. To properly run an extruder requires a fair measure of starch due to its inherent qualities. It expands when heated with water; it stays expanded when cooled and dried.

The pet food industry is a behemoth, with a dog or cat for every other person in the country. Big kibble has coerced the market into thinking kibble is the way to go. In fact, a pet parents buying decision is guided by three things: cost, convenience, and correct nutrition. Its hard to have all three. Big kibble trades on its strength in cost and convenience.

Are there different types of grain-free dog food?

There are different ingredients one can replace corn, oats, wheat, etc. with. However, if its a crunchy kibble, it will contain excess carbohydrates.

What are the benefits of grain-free dog food?

Given that both with grain and grain-free can be equally dubious due to high starch content, the benefits are confined to economics and convenience.

What are the disadvantages of grain-free dog food?

A grain-free kibble will be high in starch and deliver excess carbohydrates, the same as regular grain kibble. Everyone thinks fat causes obesity. This is incorrect. Excess carbohydrates cause obesity.

Does grain-free dog food cause heart disease (DCM, enlarged heart or dilated cardiomyopathy)?

There is no credible scientific evidence for this, let alone proof. If there is a link between diet and DCM in dogs, it is far more likely to be a matter of protein quality, amount and specific amino acid amount.

Is grain good for dogs?

Grain can be fed to dogs if fed in moderation. A primordial diet is 5-7% carbohydrate, and this is the dietary level mammals are genetically evolved to consume, and thrive on best.

Is grain-free food the same as gluten-free/wheat-free dog food?

If grain-free means the diet is free of wheat, rye, barley and oats, then the diet can be considered gluten-free. There are pet food kibbles in the market that snub these specific cereal grains.

If you or your pet has a gluten intolerance, you readily grasp the relevance of this issue. Gluten intolerance is a genetic inability to digest the gliadin fraction of the wheat protein gluten. Gluten is also found in the protein of rye and to a smaller extent in barley and oats. So no, grain-free does not speak to gluten-free specifically, but often a grain-free diet can be gluten-free as well.

Can puppies eat grain-free food?

Talking about grain-free dry kibble, yes, of course, they can eat it, and given that puppies chew on anything, they will appear to relish it. The excess carbohydrates in some foods are just as bad for puppies as adults. Puppy food should derive its calories from protein and fat, not from carbohydrates.

What is the best grain-free dog food?

The question should be what is the best type of food? Regarding grain-free kibble, one can assume the various competing products all comply with AAFCOs recommended guidelines for nutrient content.

In this regard, it is not easy to identify one superior brand among dry kibbles. However, pending AAFCO changes will call for labels to state not just total calories but what percentage of these total calories derives from protein, fat and carbs. This will greatly inform pet parents buying decisions and advance awareness that low-carb diets are best.

For example, a grain-free dry kibble with 30% carbohydrate calories is better than one that is 40 or 50%. Under current label rules, this way of evaluating and ranking is not possible. When it does become the norm, it will show that natural and natural raw diets at 5-10% calories from carbohydrates are the best.

Is grain-free food better for allergies?

If a pet is indeed allergic to one of the grains shunned in grain-free formulas (viz., corn, oats, wheat, soy, barley, rice) a grain-free kibble could lessen symptoms. There was an all-meat-type pet food producer who guaranteed his meat-based product would clear any skin problem or your money back. In 30 years he never refunded a cent. Often, a dogs food sensitivity is not to a specific ingredient but to a diets overall carbohydrate analysis. Lowering starch and sugar in a diet often lessens allergic symptoms.

Is Grain-Free Dog Food Bad?

It was a routine vet visit for Oliver, Julie Carters 3-year-old Golden Retriever. At least, it was until the vet listened to Olivers heart and uttered the sentence that would change her life: He has a heart murmur.

It was February 2018, and Carter had also brought in an interesting article from the Morris Animal Foundation website noting a disturbing upswing in the number of Goldens diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM). These dogs had in common two things: They had a deficiency of taurine, an amino acid, in their blood, and they were fed boutique dog foods from small companies often with unusual, grain-free, or legume-rich ingredient lists. Oliver was eating such a diet. He had a low taurine level. And he had DCM.

Oliver, now under the care of a veterinary cardiologist, was immediately placed on a mainstream diet containing grain and was given taurine supplements as well as heart medications. He remained symptom-free until one day, without warning, he suffered a fatal arrhythmia while walking across the kitchen floor. It was August 2018, six months after his diagnosis, and just five days after celebrating his 4th birthday.

DCM is a serious disease of the heart muscle that can ultimately lead to death. It occurs more often in large breeds, and in some breeds, its thought to have a genetic component. It also typically occurs in middle-aged to older dogs. Goldens are not considered an at-risk breed for DCM in general, but they are at risk for taurine deficiency.

Taurine and Heart Disease

Taurine, an amino acid thats abundant in meat, was implicated in cases of cat DCM 30 years ago. It turned out commercial cat foods didnt contain sufficient taurine. When taurine was added to the food, DCM in cats basically disappeared.

Taurine immediately became suspect in dog DCM, but relatively few instances of taurine-deficient DCM have been identified in dogs. Certain diets, however, notably those high in lamb, rice bran, or fiber (especially beet pulp) and very lowprotein diets have been associated with canine taurine deficiency.

Fast-forward to 2018. Veterinary cardiologists started noticing higher than usual numbers of dogs with DCM. At Tufts University, Lisa Freeman, DVM, Ph.D., DACVIM, a board-certified veterinary nutritionist with a research emphasis on nutritional effects of heart disease, reported an alarming number of these dogs were eating what she called BEG (boutique, exotic-ingredient, or grain-free) diets.

Boutique diets are produced by small companies without nutritional testing facilities. Exotic-ingredient diets use unusual sources, such as kangaroo or duck, which have not received extensive testing more common sources such as chicken or beef have. Grain-free diets replace grains such as rice and corn with potatoes or legumes (beans, peas, and lentils) as a carbohydrate source. No study has ever shown grain-free to be superior to grain-inclusive diets.

The FDA Gets Involved

Freeman collaborated with several veterinary cardiologists and alerted the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In July 2018, the FDA announced it had found sufficient evidence to investigate. In November 2018, Freeman and her collaborators issued a commentary published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association. It would become one of the most downloaded articles in the history of that publication.

The FDA has since issued several updates. From January 2018 through April 2019, the FDA received reports of 553 dogs with DCM compared with previous years that ranged from zero to three dogs. These included 95 Goldens, 62 mixed-breeds, 47 Labrador Retrievers, 25 Great Danes, and more than 50 additional breeds with more than one report.

The FDA report lists 16 dog-food companies that had 10 or more cases of DCM associated with their food, but many more foods are involved. The brands themselves are probably not the important part of the report, but rather what these foods have in common.

When the diets were examined, no protein source stood out as being over-represented. In fact, the most common proteins were chicken, lamb, and fish, although some contained unusual proteins such as kangaroo, bison, or duck. More than 90 percent of the diets were grain-free, and 93 percent of the diets contained peas or lentils. A far smaller proportion included potatoes. When these foods were tested, they contained the same average percentage of protein, fat, taurine, and taurine precursors as grain-containing products.

Joshua Stern, DVM, Ph.D., DACVIM, was one of the original veterinary cardiologists who noticed the increase in DCM cases in Golden Retrievers. Since then, Stern, of the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine, has been studying Goldens with DCM and taurine deficiency. In an unpublished study of 24 Goldens with confirmed DCM and low taurine, all but one dog had substantial cardiac improvement after a diet change and the addition of supplemental taurine. All of the dogs had been eating BEG diets at the time DCM was diagnosed.

What Now?

While many dogs eating BEG diets do not appear to be developing DCM, veterinary cardiologists are recommending feeding foods made by well-established manufacturers. These conduct feeding trials and use standard ingredients such as chicken, beef, rice, corn, and wheat. They point to five American manufacturers: Purina, Hills, Royal Canin, Iams, and Eukanuba.

Critics contend that the number of reported dogs compared to the number eating these diets hardly constitutes an epidemic and that no controlled feeding trials exist that compare DCM rates in BEG versus non-BEG diets. However, most cases of DCM still go unreported, and the smaller BEG companies dont conduct feeding trials.

At least one study is now underway. Researchers at the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine have begun an AKC Canine Health Foundation-funded study to determine if diet type has an effect on the echocardiographic, taurine values, or blood biomarker values of outwardly healthy dogs. Dogs with abnormalities will be offered a diet change and then re-checked for a year afterward. Two at-risk breeds (Goldens and Doberman Pinschers) and two not-at-risk breeds (Whippets and Miniature Schnauzers) will participate.

We are working hard to help answer this question as soon as possible, says lead researcher Darcy Adin, DVM, DACVIM. This study will not answer every question but hopefully will address the issue of whether nutritionally associated DCM is real, if so what types of foods are associated with it, whether taurine deficiency plays a role, whether blood cardiac biomarkers may be useful for detection, and whether improvement can be seen after nutritional intervention.

Meanwhile, dog owners remain concerned. Thanks to dedicated veterinarians and devoted dog owners, there are excellent resources are available. Several Facebook pages are devoted to the topic; the most popular, Taurine Deficient (Nutritional) Dilated Cardiomyopathy, has more than 100,000 members. Other groups include Taurine Deficiency in Golden Retrievers and the Canine Nutritional DCM Support Group, a support group dedicated to owners who have an affected dog or have lost their dog to DCM. There is also a website.

More than a year after Olivers death, Carter copes with her loss by helping others cope with theirs, and by spreading awareness of the problem. This has prompted many owners to have their dogs hearts checked by a veterinary cardiologist.

But Oliver isnt her only concern. Riley, Carters 9-year-old Golden, has been diagnosed with the same disease. While their cases share several similarities, the most glaring one is the fact that both Oliver and Riley ate the exact same food for several years. a grain-free, limited-ingredient diet loaded with legumes, Carter says. Carter also has a loveable 1-year-old Golden named Finn who has never eaten a BEG diet, nor will he ever be fed one.

Oliver is undoubtedly the best-known DCM victim. Deciding to be proactive and educate others about this life-threatening disease was a quick and easy decision to make, Carter recalls. When Oliver was diagnosed in February 2018, there was very little information accessible to the public about canine nutritional DCM. Shortly after Olivers diagnosis, I dubbed him the Face of Dilated Cardiomyopathy, hoping that putting a face to this horrible disease would get the attention of dog owners and make it easier to educate them.

While Oliver is often recognized as the Face of DCM, he is not alone, says Carter. There are hundreds of other dogs suffering and dying from this preventable disease. I have seen firsthand how many of these heartbroken families are crumbling under the emotional, physical, and financial weight that comes along with this diagnosis.