Purina Pro Plan meets the WSAVA guidelines as does Royal Canin. I'd go with PPP personally. I still really like the Farmina Ancestral grain but I also rotate manufacturers and formulas regularly so my dogs change food every 2-3 months.

I’ve had Charlie and Rocky on Farmina AG for a couple of months now. We’re still having some issues with loose stools and bad gas. Not going to switch anything until after Charlie’s next echo.


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Just something to think about. Changing your dogs food that frequently means their skin and coat is always in flux. Changing foods will have the skin go through a change from the inside out which takes 4-6 weeks for the change to happen *think dry and changing to correct that). Then the coat can't change once outside the skin. You can have better oils on the skin to help the coat but not change the coat itself. So short hair dogs take 8-10 weeks to grow out a full coat and a long hair dog can take up to 5 months. It's what grows out of the corrected skin is where you get a changed coat. So foods that aren't designed to change or switching brands should be done every 8-10 months at best. You will notice a better coat generally if you don't switch so often and let the good foods settle the system so to speak.

That's fine, but they have lovely coats and we haven't had a single skin issue among the 4 of them. They do really well.

I rotated Callie's food every 3 or 4 weeks. Her coat was beautiful and no real issues with scratching or dry skin. Really, she was quite healthy. We rotated between Fromm and Zignature mostly and all grain free. She ate kibble 2 meals a day, and Instinct Raw once a day. Unfortunately the research on DCM came out the day after we lost her. I don't believe it was DCM that caused her to pass as the ER vet believed was a blood clot due to the TTA surgery 3 weeks prior. But my question now is what do I feed the new puppy when she comes. I am reading Farmina is good and this was recommended by the health food pet store we shopped at. But its a boutique food which many are saying to avoid the boutique food bc of lack of nutritionists on staff to do testing. Do you worry about this? Have you tested your goldens for DCM? I would like to do what you are doing, rotating Purina Pro Plan (since this is recommended by Dr. Stern) with more holistic brands like Farmina or OPen Farm. Would love your thoughts and anyone else here in this thread. Thanks

I don't worry about it personally, but I've also never fed a grain free food. I haven't done any DCM testing but my youngest goes for an echocardiogram in a few months. Farmina Ancestral grain includes grain and that's the only line I've tried. I think it meets all but one of the guidelines and I really like the brand after speaking with several Golden retriever breeders whom feed it to all of their dogs. Id see if PPP works for your puppy and then you can always talk to your vet about rotating if you want to try it.

Thanks. And one more question. Do you feed a PPP specifically for puppies or the sport one? I've read here that some people are feeding the sport PPP to puppies. With Callie, I made sure the phosphorus, I believe, was balanced with something else (I dont remember) to make sure she didn't grow too fast which would put her at risk of bone or ligament problems. Was recommended by the owner of my health food pet store.

It's probably calcium ratio that they talked about. I did do the PPP Sport after 6 months. I haven't checked their puppy formulas yet but I need to.

For Large Breed puppy food you want a not higher then a 1.4:1 ratio of Calcium to Phosphorus. Phos inhibits calcium absorption. The ratio can be 1.1:1 to 1.4:1. Regular puppy food and adult foods can be as much as 2:1.


Also, Phosphorus should never be above .8% (.9% on a dry matter basis) or you run the risk of kidney disease down the road as it's not protein that cause the kidney disease but the phosphorus in the protein.

Currently the 5 that meet WSAVA guidelines are Iams, Eukanuba, Purina, Royal Canin and Hills. More details here.. https://www.facebook.com/groups/TaurineDCM/