I know this post is a few years old but I wanted to add my experience. As we all search for answers, maybe a pattern will emerge! I have an 12 year old wheaten who has had seizures for the past 18 months. We have been giving her phenobarb with moderate success. She never goes longer than a month without seizures but generally only has one every 3-4 weeks. Mostly, but as the budget allows, she now eats a commercial frozen raw brand with occasional dry as a substitute/supplement or for convenience when we travel. A month ago, I replaced her raw food with a new dry food. After two days on the new food, she had a three days full of seizures every 10-12 hours. Disclaimer-this was two days past her 4 week mark of being seizure free so ONE seizure at this time wasn’t unexpected. I quit that food immediately. But neither the vet nor I really believed it could affect her seizures so much. Fast forward three weeks of continuing on the raw frozen again and no more seizures. I hadn’t thawed out enough for this past Saturday’s complete meal so I supplemented with a SMALL portion of the dry food (yes, the previously mentioned new dry food). Six hours later, she had two seizures within 15 min of each other, then a third two hours later. At this point, I took her to the ER, fearing the speed at which this was escalating. Within four hours, she’d had two more, one of which was violent enough to scare the vet tech. After 5 seizure free hours, they gave her some food -one of the Hills prescription canned-. She had a seizure within an hour. After a few more hours, they fed her. She had a seizure within an hour. After a few more hours, they fed her……She had a seizure within an hour. And yes, this trend wasn’t noticed until the third round, even though I noted it after the First feeding. But that’s another story. So……..I am firmly convinced that yes, food can be a GIANT seizure trigger. Like another reply said, probably not a whole cause (but really, who knows?), but most definitely something that can put them over that seizure threshold. I’m trying to determine why said foods are doing that. The two foods don’t share any main ingredients. The dry food is supposedly a high quality food. However, I’m discovering that pea proteins are fast taking over the “high quality”, grain free world of dog food. And even though meat is the main ingredient, we can’t discount how much of the protein content is coming from sources other than the meat. Dogtor J has a theory on food and seizures I’m interested in. Hindsight being 20/20, I’d also like to add that a couple of months prior to her very first seizure, we’d been trying new dog foods because a)she was suddenly hungrier than she had been….after years of eating the same amount and being satisfied and b) her skin issues were no longer being held at bay. Perhaps our dog food’s formula had changed? It was a chicken/chickpea formula I settled on to aid with her skin flareups. Or maybe that formula didn’t change, but instead her body just couldn’t process it anymore. Or maybe the hunger obsession is indicative of a brain lesion/tumor, although that doesn’t explain the seizures that immediately followed certain meals. My gut tells me her seizures are related to her gut…..not necessarily as easy as eating better food (we haven’t found a magic answer there yet) but even due to some disorder or malfunction that’s keeping her body from processing correctly……but I believe her ongoing interest(read obsession) in food (she’s been known to eat her own poop during some of her hunger phases) is related to the seizure puzzle. For what it’s worth, we’ve returned home and had a few meals of her raw food with no additional seizures.
