What food sensitivities cost to diagnose

The expensive part of a food sensitivity is rarely the treatment. It is the eight months and several hundred pounds spent working out what the trigger was.

This is one of the bills that arrives years in, all at once, attached to bad news. Worth understanding before it does.

Run the arithmetic first — 25 lb dog

All of this derives from the label and the current price, so it moves when they do:

• Complete meal: 2.0 cups a day — about $9.22, and a 14 oz bag lasts 3.9 days
• Quarter bowl: 0.5 cups a day — about $2.31, and a bag lasts 15.6 days
• Over a year at a quarter bowl: roughly $841

Hold that number in mind for the rest of this page, because everything below is a comparison against it.

Middle age is where it goes wrong quietly

Activity falls before appetite does. The portion that was correct for a four-year-old is a surplus for a seven-year-old, and nothing announces the change — which is how a lean dog becomes an overweight one without anyone deciding.

Muscle is the thing worth protecting

Protein requirements hold or rise with age to preserve lean mass; it is calories that usually need to come down. Conflating the two is common and costs muscle, which is the tissue that keeps an older dog mobile.

What shows up first

Stool volume moves within about a fortnight of a diet change, because ingredients a dog cannot absorb have to leave somewhere. Coat takes four to six weeks, since you are waiting on new growth rather than repairing what is already there.

Which bill do you want

You are going to spend the money — on food, or on the vet, or most likely both. The bill was never the question. The question is which one: the one you choose, in a bag, at a price you decided. Or the one you do not choose, at 9pm on a Sunday, when the only thing you want to hear is that it can be fixed.