sodium content in dog food

Question
My 12 year old dog has heart disease and recently (suddenly) developed diarrhea on
most canned dog foods. I originally tried boiled chicken and rice  but he still had
diarrhea so that is when the vet put him on  Hills ID and it worked like magic. He
also now has pulmonary edema and when I read about Hills ID I notice it says not to
use if sodium retention is a problem. I have a feeling this new dog food has
contributed to his high salt intake.  In retrospect , the switch to Hills ID seems to be
temporally related to when his pulmonary edema became more of an issue . I have
had to increase his diuretics. Do you have suggestions , recipes , etc for what I can
do for him? I would love to just cook his meals so I know what he is getting but I
know he needs vitamins also.  Thank you

Answer
Hi Karen,
Sorry it took me so long to get back to you..my life has been crazy. Be careful of home cooking as you must know what you are doing and yes, you need to KNOW about supplements and vitamins if you are going to home cook. Just for your own records, here is a link to a gal that has really helped a couple of friends of mine and she IS an animal nutritionist and will help you. Here is her link.

www.askariel.com   Her name is Susan Davis.

Now, obviously the diet you currently have him on doesn't meet your requirements. W/d or vet food isn't going to either. Your vet recommended these because they are better than a lot of other diets out there and easy to find. I would suggest Innova EVO or a similar diet. It's grain free with only 0.44% sodium. It's a high calorie diet so you feed less of it.

There's been a lot of success feeding EVO to diabetics and it's a much higher quality food. All human grade ingredients, never been recalled, made in the US with ingredients only from the US. If you feed the 95% meat canned food, it only has 0.15% sodium and with the higher water content, it would probably be your best option. There are a lot of flavors to choose from too and I haven't met a dog who would turn it down yet.

I don't know if you also need to be on a high protein, low carb, no grain diet though. EVO was the first like this and there are several companies making similar diets now too. "Raw" would be another way to go, but it's very difficult to balance the diet on your own and you'd need to buy supplements. I would suggest working with a board certified nutritionist on balanceit.com if you want to do that, but you're going to pay more to feed your dog a "raw" diet.

Anyway, I gave you the link to Susan Davis and now you have balanceit.com so I hope this all helps. Let me know, Susan