[Gary A]

It’s been a while but I though that I would add to this. After two years of our little Field Spaniel suffering from from Acute Hemorrhagic Gastroenteritis and over a year of food elimination diet trials, our vets finally ran him through an expensive battery of allergy tests. Our the vets had informed us up front that the expensive tests only had a 75% accuracy rate and allergy testing was not recommended for the diagnosis of food allergies; we were okay with that, we were getting desperate. Now, the tests showed us pretty conclusively that he had no allergies to natural unprocessed animal proteins ; however they cannot test for the highly over-processed proteins found in commercial dog food, too many processing methods. But what did come up was that he was deathly allergic to flax products, he scored over 500 on the allergen panel. He also scored over 300 for tomato products. Even allowing for the 75% accuracy rate, those two items were simply just too high to ignore.

We immediately sought out foods that contained no flax or tomato products, and it was surprisingly pretty difficult. We found a few, and immediately began him on a diet changeover routine. Within a week there were no more bloody raspberry jam stools, no more bloody vomiting, his little stomach calmed right down. Its now been almost a year that he’s been free of any severe gastroenteritis symptoms; he still gets the occasional upset stomach, but that seems to be mostly from eating grass.

I guess the biggest question I have out of all of this is if flax and tomato products are “so safe” for our pets, then why are the allergy testing companies actively testing for flax and tomato in their panels? We already know that not only is flax seed is a natural source of cyanide, but the touted rich plant based sources of omega 3 contain ALA, rather than EPA and DHA, and that ALA is not readily bioavailable in our dogs and cats. Also odd, I’ve recently read that Flaxseed Allergy is now considered an emerging allergen in humans.

• This reply was modified 11 months, 2 weeks ago by Gary A.
• This reply was modified 11 months, 2 weeks ago by Gary A. Reason: grammatical