OP, what Wellness formula did you change your dog to? I wonder how your dog is doing now since this thread is old. We are awaiting thyroid results on our Boston terrier but the vet doesn't really feel it is that. If it's not, we will have to go to a low fat food. After reading your post, I am hopeful that his eyes will clear a bit.

One of my girls developed the corneal deposits while on EVO. The opthalmologist told me that the deposits were fatty deposits, and were due to a high fat diet - most especially, a high fat chicken diet. She said that dogs process chicken as a high fat food (unlike people) and that I should stay away from chicken in the future. She recommended a low fat fish diet as being optimal. I now feed this particular dog Holistic Select Anchovy, Sardine, and Salmon food and her eye deposits have completely cleared.

It is my understanding that the eye deposits are a result of the dog not processing fat efficiently and have nothing to do with protein levels in a food. BTW, my other dogs are currently eating Orijen and everyone is doing great. Not every food suits every dog - you just have to figure out what works for your particular dogs.

This sounds like two vet opthamologists that don't agree about the reason for this problem. It is interesting that both are grain-free foods with high protein. Do both foods have high fat also?

It's not as easy to find fish based foods with all the rest you might want in them. Especially if you have your dog on a grain free for a specific reason.

If either were my dog, I would go for a 2nd opinion to be sure another opthamologist agrees with the cause.

Orijen is 16 and I believe EVO is 22 fat.

I agree with a second opinion and would be interested to hear the results.

I contacted my supplier who contacted Champion about the CD and this is the response. I know these people are not opthos or specialists in any way but hope the info will be helpful just the same.

" Sorry for taking so long in getting back to you but we did want to ensure we were answering you correctly. Our nutritionist could not find a correlation between the fat deposits on eyes to the protein in food. We also asked an outside consultant who has a PHD in Nutrition and she came back with the same findings we had that this is usually caused by cholesterol not protein and it is also usually hereditary.

I hope this helps.

Clark"



" Hi Clark

I checked this out myself and I have forwarded it to Angele as well for her thoughts because I was not finding anything related to protein content. She has replied mentioning the same things I found. There is mention that it can be related to cholesterol in some dogs and a build-up of cholesterol can lead to the clouding of the eyes. The mention was that there were fatty deposits on the eyes. This is not related to the protein content of the food. If the dog is unable to properly process fat and cholesterol then it can build up and cause this, but it is generally more prevalent in certain breeds. I am not sure what breed this dog is, but it would be interesting to know if it were part of the list in the following paper:"

http://www.vmdb.org/dx2.html

I don't think you can generalize that this food (Orijen), or any higher protein food, can cause problems such as corneal dystrophy. How would you explain the fact that dogs on lower protein diets also get corneal dystrophy showing up? Dogs have had corneal dystrophy showing up for a very long time, way before the advent of higher protein diets kibbles.

Corneal dystrophy is not necessarily caused by high cholesterol; the problem lies in where the cholesteral is deposited. For whatever reason, dogs with CD are unable to filter lipids through the eyes' filtering system and they end up depositing there.

And a human WebMD site for women can't be generalized to dogs; we aren't the same species, and not everything works the same. Dogs are carnivores; people are omnivores. I've never heard about wild canines having a problem with huge rates of corneal dystrophy due to their huge intake of protein.

I don't think I would feed my dogs such high protein food! When my older bitch was young I fed her food witch had a little higher protein and she suddenly got ear infections and allergies do to the fact of too high protein. Now she is on Pro Pac Large Breed Adult 23% protein and 13% fat and she has never had this problem before! I feed puppies from age 4 wks to 8 wks Performance puppy with 30% protein and 20% fat... after 8 weeks they are on Large Breed Puppy 26% protein and 14% fat. I like Pro Pac and I am very pleased with how my dogs look like, how their coats looks like and their stools. They are all very healthy and eat it very well!

I am the original OP.... Have been reading this thread... Started to research a little more about high protein.... Am attaching some info from 1995 that I thought was interesting and plan on researching a bit more on proteins and see if I find anything else more recently dated.

http://www.thepetcenter.com/article.aspx?id=3408

2004

http://www.b-naturals.com/newsletter/puppy-protein/

2009

http://www.b-naturals.com/newsletter/dogs-and-protein/

http://www.dogfoodproject.com/index.php?page=protein_myth

http://www.dogfoodproject.com/index.php?page=grain_free

PS: the article you posted says at the top of the page

"written by The Pet Center on Tuesday, September 15, 2009"

An informative thread on another forum:

http://www.pets.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=48372

Thanks Orijen, can you tell I didn't have my glasses on! LOL!