Feeding a Lagotto Romagnolo: What the Science Shows

We feed Royal Canin Medium Puppy through 12 months and Royal Canin Medium Adult after that. Other WSAVA-compliant brands are also reasonable: Purina Pro Plan, Hill’s Science Diet, Eukanuba, Iams. What matters more than brand is that the food carries an AAFCO Growth statement for puppies, has a calcium-to-phosphorus ratio between 1.1:1 and 1.4:1, and is grain-inclusive. Feed measured meals and keep your dog at body condition score 4–5 out of 9. That covers most of what matters; the chapters explain why.

Keep your dog lean, at a body condition score of 4 to 5 on a 9-point scale. It is the best-supported finding in canine nutrition research. The 14-year Purina Life Span Study (Kealy et al. 1992, 2002; Lawler et al. 2008) followed 48 Labrador Retrievers and found that dogs fed 25% less than their littermates had 57 to 72% less hip dysplasia at age 2, developed osteoarthritis 1.5 years later on average, and lived 1.8 years (16%) longer. No supplement or diet in the peer-reviewed literature comes close to that effect.

You should be able to feel the ribs easily without pressing, see a defined waist from above, and see an abdominal tuck from the side. That is body condition score 4–5 out of 9, the ideal range. Most people think this looks too thin because they are used to seeing overweight dogs; about 59% of U.S. dogs are overweight or obese. For a Lagotto, the breed standard gives about 24–31 lb for females and 28–35 lb for males. Across eleven years our adults have averaged 32 lb (males 35, females 31), ranging 25 to 36 lb, at a lean BCS 4–5.

No. Never supplement calcium in a growing puppy (under 12 months); under six months they cannot regulate absorption at all. Tryfonidou et al. (2002, Journal of Nutrition) showed that passive absorption accounts for roughly 53% of dietary calcium in growing dogs and cannot be turned down, so a puppy absorbs excess calcium whether it needs it or not. Excess calcium during growth contributes to hip dysplasia, osteochondritis dissecans, hypertrophic osteodystrophy and other developmental orthopedic disease. A complete puppy food already contains the right amount. Do not add calcium, bone meal, cottage cheese in bulk, or raw bones.

For medium-breed dogs (Lagotto, Cocker Spaniel, Border Collie and similar): transition over two weeks at 12 to 14 months of age. Small breeds transition earlier (10–12 months); large and giant breeds later (18–24 months). Puppy food contains more calories and calibrated calcium and phosphorus for growth; adult food does not. Switching too early can slow growth; switching too late can contribute to overweight.

Puppies need multiple meals: 3 to 4 meals until 12 weeks, 3 meals from 3 to 6 months, and 2 meals from 6 months onward. For adult dogs, twice daily is a reasonable default. A 2022 Dog Aging Project analysis (Bray et al., GeroScience) of over 24,000 companion dogs found that adults fed once daily had lower odds of several disease categories, but the study is cross-sectional and correlational, not causal. Puppies should never be fed once daily.

No more than 10% of daily calories, the standard figure from the American Animal Hospital Association. A 30-pound dog eating about 700–800 calories a day has a treat budget of roughly 70–80 calories. Count the training treats, the cheese, the peanut butter and the table scraps; they add up quickly and are a major driver of canine obesity.

Ranked by strength of peer-reviewed evidence: (1) weight management, the largest effect of anything studied for canine joints; (2) marine omega-3 fatty acids (EPA and DHA) at about 100 mg per kg body weight per day, the best-studied joint supplement in dogs; (3) cold-processed green-lipped mussel extract, specifically PCSO-524 (Antinol), which matched carprofen for pain reduction in Kampa et al. 2023; (4) undenatured type II collagen (UC-II), with moderate evidence that is mostly manufacturer-funded. Glucosamine and chondroitin consistently fail to beat placebo on objective measures. There is essentially no peer-reviewed evidence that supplementing healthy young dogs prevents future joint problems.

Nutritional balance is only one of two problems. The other is pathogen contamination: the FDA’s Vet-LIRN network found Salmonella or Listeria in about 20% of commercial raw pet food samples, compared with roughly 0.1% of dry foods (Nemser et al. 2014), and a 2022 study (Vecchiato et al.) found that every raw meat-based diet tested had at least one nutritional concern and 96% failed hygiene thresholds. The AVMA, CVMA, WSAVA and AAHA, along with the CDC and FDA, recommend against raw feeding, largely because of the risk to people in the household. If you want home-prepared food, the evidence-based alternative is a cooked diet balanced with BalanceIT.com (University of California, Davis).

The concern is diets with high proportions of legumes (peas, lentils, chickpeas, pea protein) as primary ingredients, not grain-free as such. The FDA began investigating a link to canine dilated cardiomyopathy in 2018 and paused public updates in December 2022. Peer-reviewed research since then has continued to find cardiac differences in dogs on high-pulse diets (Owens et al. 2023, Coppinger et al. 2024, and a November 2025 narrative review in Veterinary Sciences). Feed grain-inclusive unless your veterinarian directs otherwise, and avoid diets with pulses in the top 5 to 10 ingredients.

True food allergies are uncommon, about 0.2% of dogs. When they occur, the most common sources are beef (34% of cases), dairy (17%), chicken (15%), wheat (13%), soy (6%) and lamb (5%), according to the 2016 systematic review by Mueller, Olivry and Prélaud in BMC Veterinary Research. Grain is well down the list, so the marketing of grain-free food as hypoallergenic is not well supported. Do not avoid chicken preemptively; diagnosis requires a veterinarian-supervised elimination diet trial, and blood and saliva tests for food allergy are not reliable.