Dalmatians should be on a low purine diet. We have one specially formulated meal which is suitable for Dalmatians, our Paleo Plus Special Diet.
The Paleo Plus Special Diet product is a low phosphorous, low purine product. It is not held up as a Dalmatian only food. Paleo Ridge does not currently produce any breed-specific raw diets, perhaps something we’ll explore someday in the future.
Paleo Plus Special Diet is a broad-spectrum diet, geared towards dogs suffering kidney issues. As you can imagine, this is a complicated disease affecting many breeds. From chronic kidney failure to crystals to stones, dogs suffering ‘Kidney issues’, obviously need a particular diet suited to them. While we believe the answer is always fresh and raw meat for meat eaters, the specific diet may need tailoring and this is exactly why we don’t include any medicinal herbs. For instance, general kidney failure benefits from low phosphorous. Dogs with crystals cannot have carbs (and as dogs do not require them, we don’t include them) and dogs with stones want low purine.
If your dog has stones currently, then we would highly recommend seeking advice from a vet nutritionist who will be able to help advise on the best diet, however it is our opinion that dogs cannot live healthy and full lives without being fed organs and for this reason, all of our complete meals include offal. We will never leave them out. It is of course possible to create a ‘Complete’ diet as per Fediaf guidelines without offal. We do not hold up Fediaf as the gold standard of raw nutritional principles as it has been created and developed for dry food products. Again, leaving offal out of our meals is something we will never do, long term it is suspected to cause issues for dogs.
Thus for the Paleo Plus Special Diet, we have slashed to organ additions to as low as we possibly could, only 2% liver as it adds so much phosphorus (and purine). This, along with a number of other tweaks and changes, including our meat and bone choices and boosting veg content to 20% (we added more carrots for Vitamin A which dogs with Kidney issues benefit from) resulting in Special Diet being, when compared to other leading brands promoting support products for Kidneys, roughly ¼ the value of Phosphorus per 100g. This is a huge step forward for the industry, certainly for dogs looking for a kidney health option.
With Purine we took the same approach. We’d like to offer you the most accurate information possible on the purine levels in our food, although as you may be aware it’s something which is very difficult to ascertain, likely the reason that no raw manufacturer currently publishes this data.
We have found a source of information which provides Total Purines in mg uric acid/ 100g Average. This information is also listed on a well-known Dalmatian welfare site which can be found here - https://www.dalmatianwelfare.co.uk/living-with/feeding/.
Using this information, we have put together a table which we suggest you use as a guide when looking at our Special Diet product.
Please see the table below.
We have come to a value of 135.4 total purines in mg uric acid/100g (average). Please note we have used Beef meat and Pork meat in place of our Pork trim and Beef Tripe as these are the closest values available. For our Pork ribs, we have used the value for Pork chop with bone, as this was the only pork product listed with bone. This figure of 135.4 suggests a value lower than most meat mixes available on the market today. For example, Chicken breast with skin has a value of 175, which is often used to create low phosphorous, low purine raw diets. Paleo Plus Special Diet was formulated to be low purine and phosphorous and we are pleased with the end result.
Again, with regards to adding offal, which is high in purine, we have included a very low percentage, in fact the lowest we could possibly add whilst still making this a complete product. From the table, you will see that the value being contributed to the product from Liver alone is 11, less than ¼ of the value that beef tripe is contributing.
Finally, if purine is a concern, it is absolutely accepted that you can further reduce the purine content further by adding more plant additions, which are very low in purine. This is entirely your prerogative, however we cannot do this for you as it would likely alienate the rest of the customers looking to use this product.
We hope this helps however, please do contact us if you have any queries.
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