Tag Archives: Food

When someone says their dog is allergic to chicken, what they almost always mean is that their dog reacted to a food with chicken on the label. Those are not the same observation, and the gap between them is what this article is about. In this second article, I move from the “reaction” part of that term into the second half – what’s actually in the food.

“Reaction to food” is not one thing. It is an umbrella term covering four fundamentally different mechanisms that produce overlapping symptoms but require different responses. Conflating them does not just lead to wrong conclusions — in some cases it leads to management strategies that actively make things worse.