What to feed a dog with colitis

Colitis is a condition, which causes inflammation of the colon, also known as the large intestine or the large bowel. In dogs, colitis is a term often used to describe multiple gastrointestinal conditions. Colitis can be caused by stress, gut infections, food allergies, bacterial and parasitic infections and immune diseases.

Gastro-Intestinal Conditions That Are Often Called Colitis

Conditions that may be called colitis include:

Inflammatory bowel disease

Also known as IBD, inflammatory bowel disease occurs when white blood cells invade the intestine, causing the lining to become swollen. IBD in dogs can affect appetite and impair digestion and the absorption of nutrients. Symptoms include chronic diarrhea and vomiting.

Irritable bowel syndrome

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is often triggered by stress. Stress colitis in dogs can cause changes in bowel habits, loss of appetite, reduced energy levels, bloating and vomiting.

Pancreatitis

Pancreatitis occurs when the pancreas is inflamed. Pancreatitis in dogs can be very serious and even life-threatening, so it is critical to seek expert advice. Symptoms include hunching the back, vomiting, diarrhea, lethargy and abdominal pain.

Parasitic infections

The most common parasites found in dog intestines include hookworms, roundworms, whipworms and Giardia. Gastrointestinal symptoms include diarrhea, blood or mucus in the stools, bloating and abdominal distension, weight loss and a lack of energy.

Bacterial infections

Bacterial infections, such as salmonella and Campylobacter, can cause diarrhea, bloody stools, weight loss, lack of appetite, vomiting and fatigue.

Food allergies

If your dog has an allergy or they are intolerant to certain foods, they may develop symptoms that affect their appetite and bowel movements. Examples of the most common food allergies in dogs include dairy foods, eggs, beef and wheat.

Colitis GI Signs and Symptoms to Watch For in Your Dog

Common symptoms of colitis in dogs include:

• Loose, runny stools
• Vomiting and nausea
• Diarrhea
• Weight loss
• Increased flatulence
• Blood or mucus (or both) in the stools
• Abdominal pain
• Straining to pass stools
• Lethargy and fatigue

If you notice any of these symptoms in your dog, it’s important to consult your vet. Gastrointestinal conditions can often be managed effectively with a tailored diet and other therapies and treatments to ease symptoms.

A Holistic Approach to Treating Your Dog’s Colitis With an Improved Diet

Start with a dog-friendly elimination diet

If you think there is a chance that your dog may have a food allergy or intolerance, it may be beneficial to try a food elimination diet. This involves cutting out all the foods your dog usually eats and using just two basic ingredients, such as turkey and sweet potatoes, for a period of time. As your dog’s digestive symptoms ease, you can add additional ingredients gradually. Observe and note down your dog’s symptoms and any changes in their eating and bowel habits.

Most holistic vets will recommend a grain-free diet

It is important to consider a diet for dogs with colitis carefully. The foods you give your dog can impact digestive health and either improve or exacerbate symptoms. Most holistic vets will recommend grain-free recipes. This is because grains can increase the risk of sensitivity in the GI tract and contribute to inflammation.

Digestive enzymes, yogurt and probiotics can help to improve digestion, alleviate symptoms and enhance absorption of key nutrients required for optimum gut and general health. Examples of probiotics that can be added to dog food include lactobacillus and acidophilus.

Add herbs to your dog’s diet (Slippery elm, calendula, marshmallow, pumpkin seed)

Herbs that are beneficial for colitis include pumpkin seed, calendula, marshmallow and slippery elm. Pumpkin seeds, calendula and slippery elm boast anti-inflammatory properties, and they help to protect the delicate lining of the GI tract. Plantain can also help to soothe and reduce inflammation of the lining, and pectin, a soluble dietary fiber, helps to regulate bowel movements to lower the risk of diarrhea. We recommend The Honest Kitchen Perfect Form supplement, which is packed with natural herbs and goodness, to promote healthy digestion and support dogs prone to colitis and bouts of IBS.

Grain-Free Foods to Help With IBD, IBS and Other Colitis Symptoms

If you’re looking for advice about how to treat colitis in dogs naturally, and you want to introduce your dog to grain-free foods, here are some products to try from The Honest Kitchen:

Health Disclaimer: This post is educational in nature and doesn’t constitute health advice. Please consult your pet's veterinarian or other healthcare professional for specific guidance on this topic.

Feeding a dog with colitis the best diet is going to help them recover faster and maintain their appetite. It’s all too easy to waste money of useless supplements and expensive “treatments” when feeding the right food is all that’s needed.

My dog is recovering from a nasty bout of colitis. What foods can I offer her to tempt her to eat again?  

Okay, and so my next question is from Amanda and she says that her dog is recovering from a nasty bout of colitis. What food can I offer her to tempt her to eat again?

What is Colitis?

So let's start off with what colitis is. So colitis is due to a problem in the lower intestinal tract. So not up by the stomach, but lower down. And typically we'll see straining, sometimes little produced and sometimes with a lot produced. As well as straining, the hallmark of colitis is that there is mucus or some blood or both in the stool.

Now generally colitis is actually due to a problem within the colon rather than the rest of the body. If you've got vomiting or a more watery diarrhea, then these can be caused by things going on within the rest of the body. But if your dog or cat has just got colitis, then typically it's a problem within the gut itself.

The Best Diet for Colitis

So really we want to be feeding a bland food that is easily digestible. You should be avoiding high fat foods, avoiding high salt foods, avoiding rich foods even though they're the ones that your dog may find most appetizing, most appealing.

We don't want to be using those because they're just going to irritate the gut. That gut is going to have a harder time digesting those and that's going to perpetuate the diarrhea.

Home cooked or commercial?

Really we then want to move on to the question: do we want a home cooked diet or do we want a commercial diet?

There are various quality commercial diets out there, and they're specifically designed for intestinal recovery. They’re easily digestible, they contain prebiotics to encourage the good bacteria and discourage harmful bacterial overgrowth, and they're also a complete diet so they can be fed longer term without problems.

If we're wanting instead to feed a home cooked diet, we can feed things like boiled chicken, rice and pasta, whitefish, a cottage cheese or scrambled egg as long as you're not adding loads of butter and salt and things like that.

You could also try blending that just to make things a little bit easier for the stomach to digest but we also need to bear in mind that these diets are not balanced, not as easily digestible, and don’t containing prebiotics. They will be fine for mild cases and OK to feed for a few days, that's not a problem, but it's not something that we would want to be feeding long-term because of that lack of balance among other things.

Probiotics

Now, something else we can think about is giving probiotics. Probiotics are the live bacteria that are normally found in the gut. Effectively giving an extra dose of those just to try and encourage the re-colonization of the colon or of the intestines with these healthy bacteria.

The idea is that probiotics can speed up recovery, but actually they don't tend to make a huge amount of difference in the time frame for recovery. It might be that recovery time is improved by half a day, but it's not making a really significant improvement in that recovery time and there's probably a number of reasons for that.

We don't necessarily know the best bugs to include in these probiotics. Also, the probiotic industry is unregulated and quality control is really poor. We're giving live bacteria, so handling needs to be very careful. they needs to have been stored correctly. The manufacturing needs to have gone through some quite strict regimes to make sure that they're producing live bugs.

There have been independent tests that looked into the different concentrations of live bacteria in some of these probiotics, and in some cases it's really tiny or even nonexistent. So that's something to think about as well. These are unlikely to cause any harm, but more likely you're just going to be wasting your money.

Tempting Your Dog to Eat

Okay and then moving on to how to get a dog to eat, how to tempt them to eat. Your dog will obviously want fresh food. We don't want to just leave food down for ages that's getting stale, it's getting dry and getting a bit manky. So we want to make sure there's a fresh food supply.

Warming it up can help as well. That helps increase the smell, which can be just enough to encourage a dog to eat.

Hand feeding can really help as well to encourage a dog to eat. Having said that, we get some pets that are private eaters, so they like to eat by themselves and don't like to be watched. If your pet is one of those, if your dog prefers to eat by itself, then just leave them to it for 20 minutes in a room with their food and see what happens. Don't hover anxiously to see if they are eating because that's only going to put them off.

When to See Your Vet

And then the final thing to say is that if your dog with colitis is not eating, is not recovering, seems to be getting worse or there are any other problems going on like not drinking, vomiting or lethargy; really you need to reassess that diagnosis with your vet.

You definitely need to get a vet check in the first place or talk to your vet again. Go back to your vet for a re-examination because things do change and it might not just be a simple colitis that we're dealing with. Your dog might need additional treatment. So that could be anti-nausea treatments for example, they might need specific treatments for something like giardia that isn't just going to resolve by itself, or there may need to be different tests run to try and reach a diagnosis. So that could be fecal testing, it could be blood testing, it could be X-rays, it could be a whole number of different things.

So if you've got a dog who is sick, who isn't getting better, or is getting worse, than we definitely need to reassess the diagnosis and treatment plan by checking in again with your vet.

The above is a transcript taken from “The Dr Alex Answers Show”.

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