Dog Foods and Heart Disease

Bison and chickpeas. Wild boar and sweet potatoes. Kangaroo and lentils.

These are just a few of the spectacularly popular selections of "grain-free" dog food that have deluged the pet food market in recent years. Dense with exotic proteins, and teeming with legumes favored by health-conscious humans, they are promoted as delicious as well as nutritious — better for gluten-sensitive bellies, closer to the ancestral, protein-rich diets of the Yorkie's savage forebears.

But earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration announced that it is investigating a link between these diets and a common type of canine heart disease.

The condition is dilated cardiomyopathy, or D.C.M., in which the heart weakens and becomes enlarged. Symptoms include fatigue, difficulty breathing, coughing, and fainting. Some dogs can abruptly go into heart failure.

D.C.M. is typically seen in large breed dogs that have a genetic predisposition for it, like Doberman pinschers, Irish wolfhounds, boxers, and Great Danes. But CVCA, a practice of 19 veterinary cardiologists in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. area, alerted the F.D.A. that it has been seeing D.C.M. among other breeds, including golden retrievers, doodle mixes, Labrador retrievers and Shih Tzus.

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