When your dog starts experiencing stomach problems, you don't want to continue feeding him his regular dog food in case the problems get worse, but at the same time, you don't want to stop feeding him. Preparing a bland diet may be a good way to keep him eating without upsetting his stomach even more.
Most bland diet recipes call for a mixture of rice with either cottage cheese or meat, but Linda Arndt, a canine nutritionist, recommends a slightly different approach to the bland diet in order to get a food more balanced nutritionally. No matter what you choose to feed your dog, bland diets are only to be used when your dog is having digestive troubles; feed your dog regular dog food when your his stomach has recovered. Professor Arndt recommends combining 12 cups of a 50 percent white rice and 50 percent brown rice mixture with 1 tsp. of iodized salt; three and a half cups of hamburger or ground chicken meat; three boiled and chopped eggs; a 3,000 mg tablet of calcium citrate; and a 1,000 mg tablet of magnesium citrate. Don't buy tablets with phosphorus in them, and grind the tablets into a powder before adding them into the food. The calcium citrate and magnesium citrate tablets are added to balance the mineral contents of the food, which is why avoiding phosphorus is important.
This mixture is not designed to be fed to your dog in one meal. It makes 12 cups total, so split the food into meals based on how many cups of food your dog normally consumes in one day.
For dogs who need low-fat diets because of pancreas issues, buy the leanest hamburger or chicken meat you can find. You can also try replacing half a cup of the meat with 3/4 of a cup of 1 percent fat cottage cheese. You can also replace the three eggs with four egg whites after you've removed the yolks. To change up the mixture, you can replace half a cup of meat with 3/4 of a cup of cottage cheese and a teaspoon of olive oil, or if your dog will eat vegetables, you can add chopped steamed vegetables to the food mixture. You can also add bits of melon or berries to make the mixture more palatable. (Make sure the kind you choose to feed to your dog is not toxic to dogs.)