Advance Sensitive Skin & Digestion Dog Food Review
The real reason you’ll want to feed a Sensitive Skin & Digestion dog food is because your previous dog food contained ingredients not suitable for your dog.
More often than not, I find this to be wheat, “cereals“, or food additives if the cause was dietary – so make sure you take a look at the ingredients of that old food as it may give you the best answers.
Chicken and beef can cause sensitivities with dogs too – and this is what veterinarians tend to believe is the most common cause – but this may make you wonder why the puppy formulas of Advance Sensitive Skin & Stomach contain poultry, and the adult recipes don’t.
That said, I expect you’re looking for a solution to your dog’s itchy skin, itchy ears, hot spots, rashes, or gut issues such as diarrhoea or smelly farts, which are more common than you may expect with dogs fed kibble.
Let’s take a look at Advance Sensitive Skin & Digestion, and hopefully you’ll have all the answers you need to find the best solution for your dog!
Related: An honest guide to hypoallergenic dog foods.
Advance Sensitive Skin & Stomach review
We’ll take a look at the Sensitive Skin & Digestion Adult Turkey with Rice formula, but keep in mind the points I cover will apply to all in the range.
Advance is an Australian pet food, but actually a brand of Mars Petcare who make many of the dog food brands sold in Australia. If there’s anything good I can say about Mars, their facilities are very good in terms of production and quality control.
Advance has had issues in the past, but as this was several years ago I would consider this largely redundant. I haven’t received any negative reports of late, so will simply focus on the formula in this review.
What the marketing says
Advance use the slogan “Expert Pet Nutrition” and “scientifically formulated to help improve dog health”, and you should take loosely.
The first comes with no legal requirements for the food to be expertly formulated other than meet the regulations all dry dog foods need to meet, and as for the second statement – compared to any worse kibble this would of course be true, but is it optimal for your dog?
What the ingredients really say
Based on real science about our dogs having short digestive tracts, strong stomach acid, and the same dental structure as all the other animals we factually class as carnivores, we would expect a dog food to be made mostly from animal-derived ingredients.
Seeing turkey meal first on the ingredient panel therefore looks good, but like with most kibbles this is deceiving.
However, the turkey meal is only 1 of the top 5 main ingredients are animal.
How does that make you feel about the recipe, given the next 4 are grains your dog would never eat of their own accord.
We find rice (2nd), sorghum (3rd), rice flour (4th), and maize gluten (5th).
That’s a laundry list of grains.
Also, if the two rice ingredients hadn’t been split into two (both rice and rice flour are rice), then that would very likely be listed first on the ingredients panel, and wouldn’t sound very carnivore or scientific, would it?
Even if you’ve been told – and believe – your dog is an omnivore, dwell on this for a second: We also feed our factually and scientifically carnivorous cats these ingredients in kibble, and they eat it because we don’t tend to give them any choice in the matter.
That said, as a dry dog food, 26% protein (although from meat and grains) is slightly above average, and 16% fat is moderate. Carbohydrates look to sit around 42.8%, which will give you a clearer picture on how significant those grain ingredients are versus meat, which will be less.
So how does Advance Sensitive Skin & Digestion work, and “help improve dog health”?
The answer is more simple than we may expect – yes, there’s no chicken, beef, or other common animal protein allergens, but there’s also no wheat or cheap cereals which wreak havoc with your dog’s digestive system.
Combined with better quality control, Advance Sensitive Skin & Digestion is simply easier for your dog to digest than whatever dry dog food you fed previously.
Please let me know (and I won’t judge) what dog food you fed previously, as I can use the information to help other Aussie dogs diagnose what really caused their dietary problems.
Where to buy?
Advance Sensitive Skin & Digestion is a brand easily available at pet stores, online retailers, or veterinarian practices.
Ingredients
The ingredients of Advance Sensitive Skin & Digestion dry dog food (ADVANCE™ Sensitive Skin & Digestion Adult Dry Dog Food Turkey with Rice):
Turkey Meal; Rice; Sorghum; Rice Flour; Maize Gluten; Chicken Fat; Natural Flavour (Chicken); Dried Beet Pulp; Vitamins & Minerals; Fish Oil; Salt; Sunflower Oil; Inulin; Antioxidants; Amino Acids (incl. Methionine); Colostrum.
Typical Analysis
The nutritional composition of Advance Sensitive Skin & Digestion dry dog food (ADVANCE™ Sensitive Skin & Digestion Adult Dry Dog Food Turkey with Rice):
| Protein | 26% |
| Fat | 16% |
| Crude Fibre | ? |
| Carbohydrates * | Estimated 42.8% |
