cat food - name brands...

I read this on a site (I'm sorry, can't find the link at the moment)

Many cats have a tendency to develop little gritty sand-like bladder stones which cause pain and difficult urination. In males these stones can obstruct the urethra, quickly resulting in kidney failure and death. (See the section on FLUTD) Today, most commercial cat foods are formulated to minimize this problem. Stay with nationally recognized brands and you can be reasonably sure of getting good food.

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I bought an Eagle Pack brand of food for her - the chicken and rice formula... since this isn't a well known or recognized brand do you think this is likely to cause these stones in our cat?? Thank you very much.

this is the food we bought: http://www.eaglepack.com/Pages/HS_CatChix.html

Also, there seems to be a lot of fruit in it like cranberries, apples, blueberries - aren't cats carnivores?

Thanks so much!

Cats are carnivores /// but dry cat foods have to have bindders .... The magnesium is quite high , something that cats with stones shouldnt have high... You should talk with your vet... I stay away from Eagle pack in dry for different reasons though it is a premium food...

thanks... should i stay away from eagle pack? I wanted it because it didn't have any by products or corn meal in it. I know corn is hard for them to digest.

Also - do kittens have kinda loose stools? I'm guessing they should, since human babies do at times.

how old are the kittens???

Eagle pack wet would be a good choice.... truely wet is better for crystals ...

She is about 10 weeks old... isn't not runny anymore. I guess it could have been stress or whatever!

She seems to like the Eagle pack dry - haven't tried wet food yet. She seems to not be too picky - she even tried to eat bird food that the bird threw on the floor!!

Try wet food ... the Eagle pack your feeding is a good food ( formula change has made it in my book)

I have been doing a lot of reading about nutrition for cats with FLUTD, as one of my boys was diagnosed 2 weeks ago. After having his bladder flushed of struvite crystals, they have prescribed him the Hills' Prescription S/D diet for 4 weeks. Yes, I agree with you - these prescription diets have AWFUL ingredients when scored against the better brands with human-grade ingredients. However, these acidifying diets have a purpose, and contain low magnesium and phosphorus. Sidenote: Reading cat food labels is tricky because a lot of times, the guaranteed analysis is listed as a dry weight (g) basis and not "as fed" or in calories. This makes it very tricky to compare label A to label B without doing your own calculations.

The S/D has brewer rice as the first ingredient (chicken by-products as the second - blah!), however, it is the ONLY product on the market that has been shown to break up struvite stones and crystals in clinical feeding trials. Once he's done his round of S/D, there are only 2 options for prescription diets: Hill's C/D (or W/D for weight management), or Royal Canin Urinary SO. Royal Canin has slightly better ingredients than Hill's but relative to other brands, it's still a bit inferior (it has chicken meal as the first ingredient).

A particular food alone (e.g., Eagle Pack or others) isn't the only contributing factor to crystalluria. Genetics, obesity, activity level and sex of the animal are also major factors. As Sharky mentioned, wet food is truly best for crystals. With so many contributing factors to feline urinary pH, your best bet is to find a good quality dry food with lower levels of magnesium and phosphorus to promote an optimal urinary pH, and supplementing his diet with wet food. A lot of the literature suggests that moisture content (wet food, increased water uptake) is a strong contributing factor in keeping the crystalluria at bay and promoting a dilute urine. For the convenience and the cost, I've kept my boys on a quality dry food, but have been giving them 1/2-3/4 of the portion in wet food. Eventually, we'll be putting both of them on the Royal Canin Urinary SO dry food with Nutro canned.