For Gods sake when will the madness end????

plan · Jul 1, 2014

Anne mentioned something extremely important that relates to everything from cat food to the vitamins and supplements we take ourselves -- without scientific evidence and rigorous studies, we're left with opinions and anecdotes. Unfortunately, there's an irrational and strong anti-science bent in this country, and a frightening number of people don't understand the difference between good data and anecdotes.

Know anyone who takes Airborne? I do. I've got a family member who swears by the stuff, and several other people I know are convinced it works. The story is always the same: "Well, I took Airborne, and I didn't get sick." That's an anecdote. And just because you didn't get sick doesn't mean the Airborne protected you, or that you would have fallen ill if you didn't take it. The idea that a teacher in her basement came up with a potion that cures the common cold -- something the world's brightest minds have been unable to cure or prevent -- is absurd. Incredibly, ridiculously absurd. Yet the packaging and marketing makes that appeal to people, which is why that company ultimately lost a class action lawsuit for its baseless claims, and for using a "study" that "proved" Airborne's efficacy. (Problem is, the "study" was performed by a shell company owned by the people who make Airborne.)

We're seeing a bit of that anecdotal, anti-science bent in the cat nutrition category, with major cat food brands and dry food standing in for big pharma. You've always got to have a big conglomerate to hate and blame, and a "holistic" approach that is supposedly better. The danger is when people give up real, necessary treatments in favor of herbal supplements. This is what we see with vaccines and autism, right? On the one hand, you've got real scientists doing real controlled studies and compiling real data; on the other, you've got "celebrities" (I use that term loosely) like Jenny McCarthy and RFK Jr. who are out there stirring up anti-vaccine hysteria based on anecdotes and fear. McCarthy doesn't even have a high school degree. RFK Jr. has never worked a real day in his life, and his greatest accomplishment is having an exalted last name.

I'm prone to spending a lot of money on top-shelf wet cat food, although I also feed dry food. I like to have it in my kitteh's bowl overnight and in the early morning so he doesn't wake me up by slapping me in the face or attacking my hands. Do I know for sure that Blue Buffalo, for example, is really better than Friskies or 9Lives? Nope. I'm depending on the advice of an expert (the nutritionist who wrote the catinfo site) and my own instincts that natural ingredients are better for my little guy. But like Anne said, that's not proven. There isn't good science in this area, for whatever reason.

And that's why she made that point about not jumping on other people for their nutrition choices. Until we really know for sure, we're all just making educated guesses based on what experts (and a whole lot of would-be experts) are telling us. I think the vast majority of people are just trying to do right by their pets.

oneandahalfcats · Jul 1, 2014

zoneout said:
Appreciate your thoughts. I think your method of feeding a variety of canned, raw, and dry is probably a very good way to avoid the problems that occur when just relying soley on one particular food source. As much as I love pizza - surely it would make me sick if that is all I ate year after year.

Thank you.

If I am getting your drift correctly, your reference to pizza is sort of the same thing as saying, all dry food is junk. My point in responding to your initial comments, is to point out and say that it isn't, in my experience, and that of others who have found and can vouch for, good quality dry foods. And I have gone through quite a few different foods.

My issue when starting the thread was that I had just read another member`s horror stories about his blocked cat. I had both of my boys block - at 3 years old for heavens sake - just when cats should be in their prime. So it hit home.... deeply.... and disturbingly. If you have ever witnessed a blocked cats yowls of pain then you know how just the thought of it is feels like getting stabbed in the heart all over again. I don`t know .... maybe its just me. I almost cry when I see some poor raccoon as road kill now and then. I fed my cats exclusively kibble when they blocked. I wanted to know why they blocked. We had many cats when I was a kid in the 70s that my father fed raw and I had never even heard of this problem until it happened to me. I wanted to make sure it didn`t happen again so I studied the 2 possible variables in my mind: the food and the litter. I was using clay litter at the time and thought perhaps the betonite dust was getting into the penis when they sat on it and the clumping was actually happening in the urinary tract. After learning about struvite and oxalate I rejected this and focused solely on food as the culprit.

The thing is, urinary tract blockages and infections are complex things. This is why you can't just rely on ph balance, frequency or size of pee clumps, peeing once a day. All cat carers should make urinalysis a regular, yearly wellness check. To ensure that their cat is not harboring crystals or an infection. A cat can be on a diet of wet canned or dry and display zero symptoms, but still have crystals. It's important to not focus solely but be aware of the need to reduce stress and keep things as routine as possible. Change can often be a catalyst for urinary problems without us even being aware. This is why it is important that when talking about URIs, to highlight that this can happen on any diet, crystals can happen in any ph, and that there are other factors besides diet so that people can better understand and not take things for granted.

So the issue is I had no idea WHY this happened to my cats. I just wanted to avoid it again. That led me to intensive studying to hopefully prevent it. I have researched and I have my opinion. It just opens up the old wound all over again when I see this same thing happen to other innocent pet owners. And they keep coming. Hopefully they have the means and are able to get to a vet in time. Otherwise I cannot think of a much more excruciating way for a cat to have died.

I would agree. Blockages are not something to fool around with. Finding the right solution is not going to be the same for every cat, however. While wet canned and raw/homemade diets can provide the solution in providing sufficient methionine (natural acidifier in meat), this may not be enough for some cats, and so, acidifiers in the form of L-methionine, vitamin C are used to acidify the urine. Care must be taken when using these as you can end up at the other end of the spectrum, when too much acidity causes oxalate crystals.

My opinion is there could be more done to prevent this - there has to be. It probably starts with education. It just frustrates me that it looks after all these years the situation is not improving.

There is hope, and education is definitely the key.

roguethecat · Jul 1, 2014

There's a study here (Peter J. Markwell, C. Tony Buffington, and Brigitte H. E. Smith, "The Effect of Diet on Lower Urinary Tract Diseases in Cats,"

The Journal of Nutrition 128, no. 12, December 1998, 2753S-2757S) where they show the following:

"Although a cat consuming a dry food diet does drink more water than a cat consuming a canned food diet, in the end, when water from all sources is added together — what's in their diet plus what they drink — the cat consumes approximately half the amount of water compared with a cat eating canned foods. On a dry food diet, a cat's urine becomes overly concentrated which leads to feline lower urinary tract disease."

just sayin'

zoneout · Jul 1, 2014

oneandahalfcats said:

oneandahalfcats · Jul 1, 2014

Do you realize that the same sort of processing is involved in the manufacturing of wet canned food? It is heated to very high temperatures before it is vacuum-sealed in a can, thus destroying some of the nutrient value.

scorpgirl68 · Jul 1, 2014

Sorry, I am new to the thread world.

LDG said:
Anne is. She has featured a series of articles on feline nutrition. Refer to the stickied threads in the nutrition forum.

Not everyone can afford to feed wet - or only wet. But helping people make the best choices they can within their means and lifestyle is absolutely a goal.

Sorry, new to posting. Who is Anne and what are "stickied threads"? I'm interested in finding a "good" dry to feed along with wet.

pinkdagger · Jul 1, 2014

scorpgirl68 said:
Sorry, I am new to the thread world.

Sorry, new to posting. Who is Anne and what are "stickied threads"? I'm interested in finding a "good" dry to feed along with wet.

@Anne is the owner of The Cat Site. You can find the Stickied links in question here and on other main forum pages inside the big blue box, but you can also find the articles here.

zoneout · Jul 1, 2014

Andrya said:
l'm enjoying this discussion!

Someone (sorry, l don't remember who it was) asked the question, why don't veterinarians keep track of the cats they see in their practice and the food they're given.

That would be I. If I were a vet I would be doing this from day one right out of school.

Or why isn't such freely available data used, rather than having to launch studies?

Ya, this way I wouldn`t have to rely on possibly biased studies and would have my own data to spot trouble areas and trends over time.

l choose the diet l do because l think it's the right thing. l don't KNOW it's the right thing, l could very well be wrong, but l think it's the right thing based on what l've read here and elsewhere.

l would love to keep a database of anyone's cats over a long term if anyone is interested. Cats fed different diets, what the diets are, age, weight, etc. We could compare blood-work, urinalyses, annual health checks, teeth condition, etc. Just as a purely interest group, of course. PM me if you're interested.

You would have to ensure that these are real candidates of course - not some part-timer calling in from a cubicle down in the basement at Hill`s.

peaches08 · Jul 1, 2014

scorpgirl68 said:
Sorry, I am new to the thread world.

Sorry, new to posting. Who is Anne and what are "stickied threads"? I'm interested in finding a "good" dry to feed along with wet.

Welcome to TCS! As pinkdagger mentioned, there are threads that never drop down the page, they are "stickied" to the top in a blue box. Check out the nutrition forum and check out the articles on this site for more information on nutrition.

oneandahalfcats · Jul 1, 2014

The manufacturing process of wet canned food, uses the same HIGH HEAT process, that is used in dry food manufacturing, thus destroying some of the nutrients in wet canned food. This cannot be avoided. As for the comparisons to charred food, I don't see how this is even remotely connected AT ALL.

zoneout · Jul 1, 2014

oneandahalfcats said:
Do you realize that the same sort of processing is involved in the manufacturing of wet canned food? It is heated to very high temperatures before it is vacuum-sealed in a can, thus destroying some of the nutrient value. This cannot be avoided. If you want to remain uninformed and closed-minded regarding dry food, then I have nothing further to offer you.

Yes, canned food is heated to destroy bacteria that may exist - everyone knows that. But isn`t dry food heated to a much higher temp (baked if you will) in order to QUICKLY reduce moisture content to prevent mold.

I have been looking closely at dry food and have tried about 20 different brands over the last 12 years. There is no question as to its superior convenience over everything else which undoubtedly is its main attraction.

zoneout · Jul 1, 2014

Andrya said:
l'm enjoying this discussion!

Someone (sorry, l don't remember who it was) asked the question, why don't veterinarians keep track of the cats they see in their practice and the food they're given.

You know what would be really cool to do? Find a handful of recently retired or even still practicing vets in their mid 70s and put the question to them. Say, over their 50 or so years in the practice how have they seen the numbers of cats presenting with urinary blockages? Has it gone up, down, or sideways? If there is a change over the years, what do they think is causing it. I think their opinions would be wonderful to listen to.

denice · Jul 1, 2014

This is purely anecdotal but I am older, 58 and grew up on a farm in a very rural area. Pets didn't stay in the house, they had run of the place which means that cats and dogs when they were young enough caught meals to eat. We also fed table scraps, didn't know any better and then we supplemented with cheap kibble. Our dogs and cats lived long healthy lives. Was it diet or running outside in fresh air doing what they were meant to do? I don't know.

meowkittymeow · Jul 1, 2014

So, I guess I am bad because I feed dry... I had no idea it was bad

But my question is, everyone keeps talking about cats and drinking water. Is this an issue? I see my cats drinking all the time, all 4 of them. Even when I was younger and lived at home, I cannot think of a cat we had that did not drink water regularly. Is this a common problem?

goingpostal · Jul 1, 2014

Indoor cats are much less common in other parts of the world fwiw. And bread and milk is a common meal for ferrets, another obligate carnivore in other countries even still. They haven't evolved, just die young of insulinoma, a disease caused by carbs stressing the pancreas. In places where ferrets are fed mostly meat this disease is almost unheard of, in places they are fed kibble it's rampant. I know they aren't cats, but they are what got me looking into diet, watching your loved pet seizure to death is awful, realizing it was my own fault was worse. When we first got my cat I was 13, my family fed SD as they always had and she threw up constantly and clearly had stomach pain. The vet said she had hairballs. SD hairball formula. She puked. The vet said she had a sensitive stomach. SD sensitive stomach. She puked more. When I was 18 and moved out with her I got ferrets and found out they needed a meat based diet, like cats! Looked at the bag of cat food. Grains, sawdust, by product meal. Turns out there's nothing wrong with my cat at all and she suffered for all those years because we trusted our vet instead of educating ourselves. I'm 28 now and my cat is still alive and doing great, I went to better kibble, canned and then to raw. My sister free feeds SD still, she's lost 2 older cats to kidney failure, put down 2 young cats for nonstop urinary issues and is steadily working towards diabetes in the 2 cats she has now. My mom regulates SD kibble and her cat is still growing fatter and fatter. I have 3 friends last year who put down kibble fed cats for stones or bladder issues, did get one family member whose cat blocked to switch to canned and he's doing well still thankfully. Can a cat block on raw or canned, I'm sure they can, but knowing cats need no carbs and a moisture heavy diet, feeding dry food doesn't make sense. Pretending they are "evolved" to eat kibble in under a century is just silly.

irinasak · Jul 1, 2014

MeowKittyMeow said:
So, I guess I am bad because I feed dry... I had no idea it was bad :dk:

But my question is, everyone keeps talking about cats and drinking water. Is this an issue? I see my cats drinking all the time, all 4 of them. Even when I was younger and lived at home, I cannot think of a cat we had that did not drink water regularly. Is this a common problem?

It is more complicated than this.

I am sure that each of us here is struggling to make the best decisions for our cats. We do not feed kibble, wet or homemade trying to get them sick and help our vets get rich. And all of us want to have our cats alive and healthy for as much as possible.

The problem, as I see it, is not if there is good dry food or if the raw is bad or inconvenient, the problem is that most people DO NOT research and they do not take informed decisions. There are the same 10-15 members having the same debate over and over again, but the rest of the world (Europe, for example) thinks you can't feed anything better than Royal Canin dry. I have no idea what the cats are being fed in Asia of Africa.

And because most people do not have a natural inclination or pleasure in researching, or maybe because they are too busy to research, the mouth of the world is the strongest. And the mouth of the world, right now, says Whiskas is bad, buy RC or what your vets says (with regional brand variations).

What I am trying to say is that none of us is intentionally feeding them crap. It is a matter of figuring out what works. Unfortunately, that usually happens after the cats get sick.

As for the water intake, I will kindly ask @LDG to provide us again with the quantities of water a cat should drink. In the mean time, you could try to see how hydrated they are by seeing how fast the skin on the back of their neck comes back after you pinch it and monitoring the litterboxes - how big are the clumps, how many/day, how it smells.

denice · Jul 1, 2014

I admit I didn't pay a great deal of attention to what I was feeding until one of my kitties developed chronic digestive issues. I didn't feed the low end kibble, I did feed the better quality kibble but it was still kibble. My two little kibble addicts do still get a little kibble but they get mostly wet food now.

Anne · Jul 2, 2014

@MeowKittyMeow here's a link to Laurie's excellent article about increasing water intake in cats -

http://www.thecatsite.com/a/tips-to-increase-your-cat-s-water-intake

A word about processing food. Processed vs. natural is something you hear a lot lately and IMHO it can be misleading. Processing food is not a bad thing in and by itself. Cooking is probably the most common form of processing and it's very good for us humans, for example. Without it, we'd be eating pathogens along with our meats and we'd be missing out on the nutritional value of many carbohydrates. For example, if you eat a raw potato, your body can't digest most of the carbs in it. You have to cook it first, to break down the carbs into the types that our body can digest. When cooking meat, yes, the protein definitely changes. It goes through a process called denaturation which entirely changes its molecular form.

The point I'm trying to make is that these processes can actually enhance the nutritional value of foods for the animal consuming it, replacing enzymes we may not have in the case of carbs, and generally destroying pathogens through denaturation. With protein, our bodies - or those of cats - couldn't care less about the original protein anyway. It will get broken down into its building blocks, amino acids, in the stomach whether or not you cook/process it first or not.

So, processed is not necessarily bad. Just like "natural" isn't necessarily good (the most effective poisons in the world are 100% natural!)

Obviously, cats can thrive on 100% natural unprocessed small rodents and birds. We could probably thrive on raw meat, along with some fruit and insects, as well (some people swear by raw food, and I know some do take it to the extreme of raw meat too). It doesn't mean other alternatives are necessarily nutritionally bad for us or for cats.

oneandahalfcats · Jul 2, 2014

Quote:

GoingPostal said:
Indoor cats are much less common in other parts of the world fwiw. And bread and milk is a common meal for ferrets, another obligate carnivore in other countries even still. They haven't evolved, just die young of insulinoma, a disease caused by carbs stressing the pancreas. In places where ferrets are fed mostly meat this disease is almost unheard of, in places they are fed kibble it's rampant. I know they aren't cats, but they are what got me looking into diet, watching your loved pet seizure to death is awful, realizing it was my own fault was worse. When we first got my cat I was 13, my family fed SD as they always had and she threw up constantly and clearly had stomach pain. The vet said she had hairballs. SD hairball formula. She puked. The vet said she had a sensitive stomach. SD sensitive stomach. She puked more. When I was 18 and moved out with her I got ferrets and found out they needed a meat based diet, like cats! Looked at the bag of cat food. Grains, sawdust, by product meal. Turns out there's nothing wrong with my cat at all and she suffered for all those years because we trusted our vet instead of educating ourselves. I'm 28 now and my cat is still alive and doing great, I went to better kibble, canned and then to raw. My sister free feeds SD still, she's lost 2 older cats to kidney failure, put down 2 young cats for nonstop urinary issues and is steadily working towards diabetes in the 2 cats she has now. My mom regulates SD kibble and her cat is still growing fatter and fatter. I have 3 friends last year who put down kibble fed cats for stones or bladder issues, did get one family member whose cat blocked to switch to canned and he's doing well still thankfully. Can a cat block on raw or canned, I'm sure they can, but knowing cats need no carbs and a moisture heavy diet, feeding dry food doesn't make sense. Pretending they are "evolved" to eat kibble in under a century is just silly.

Well again, we are hearing about unfortunate stories involving cats that were eating sub-standard dry food. SD is full of grains such as corn, corn gluten, soy flour, soybean meal, ground wheat, ground yellow corn. There is virtually NO meat in this food, except for a bit of poultry by-product. I would think any cat would eventually get sick on this food. If you transitioned your cats to better kibble, then canned and raw, you must have learned that there is better dry food available that contains legitimate muscle meat ingredients, no grains and low to no carbs?

I think there is a mindset here that believes that all dry food is the same, without the benefit of researching to know if this is the case, and this is quite unfortunate. Cats have evolved to eat a variety of foods. There is no pretense about this, it is a fact. This is not to say that food choices through the years have all been sound, but that people fed what they felt was best given circumstances or knowledge of nutrition, just as is done today. I have done my research when it comes to cat foods of all kinds, and have no qualms about feeding my cats a bit of high quality dry food along with their meat diet, because I have taken the time to know what is, and isn't in there.

There is no question that cats need high protein in their diet, and the best source of this is wet canned or raw. But this doesn't mean that cats can't also derive nutritional value from a bit of good quality dry food, and I think a bit of dry food is what most of us are referring to when it comes to feeding dry food. That said, if people want to play it safe and stay away from kibble, rather than taking the time to be informed to learn about the differences between good dry food and bad, then this is their choice I guess.

plan · Jul 2, 2014

roguethecat said:
There's a study here (Peter J. Markwell, C. Tony Buffington, and Brigitte H. E. Smith, "The Effect of Diet on Lower Urinary Tract Diseases in Cats,"

The Journal of Nutrition 128, no. 12, December 1998, 2753S-2757S) where they show the following:

"Although a cat consuming a dry food diet does drink more water than a cat consuming a canned food diet, in the end, when water from all sources is added together — what's in their diet plus what they drink — the cat consumes approximately half the amount of water compared with a cat eating canned foods. On a dry food diet, a cat's urine becomes overly concentrated which leads to feline lower urinary tract disease."

just sayin'

Thanks for posting the link to that study, it's an interesting read. Another reason to love the internet: definitions to heady medical terms are a few keystrokes away.

There's also this in the section called "Augmenting urine volume":

The proportion of cats showing recurrence of lower urinary tract disease was significantly less in a group fed a canned, commercial acidifying diet (11%) than in another group fed the dry formulation of the same product (39%) (Markwell et al. 1998). The mechanism for this effect was not determined in the study, but was considered likely to be the result of changes in the concentration or type of solutes in urine and/or changes in urine volume.

And this:

It has been shown that cats fed diets containing differing amounts of moisture drink quite different amounts of water (Burger et al. 1980).

And then this, in a section that takes into consideration whether it's the food itself -- or the overall moisture content -- that makes the apparent difference in urine volume, which the authors believe can prevent or suppress UTI:

Similar data were reported in another study involving cats fed a single diet to which increasing amounts of water were added (Gaskell 1985). When the water content of the food was 10 or 45%, total water intake, urine volume and specific gravity were not different among groups. When the water content of the food was increased to 75%, however, total water intake and urine volume increased, and urine specific gravity decreased. Because the diet was the same in all cases, water intake (from food) probably increased as a consequence of increased food intake to meet energy needs from the water-diluted diet. Thus the differences in urine volumes and specific gravities observed in some of the studies discussed may be more a reflection of differences in the PRSL and/or the energy content of dry and wet diets, rather than moisture content per se. In consequence, if a cat is changed from a dry to a wet diet as part of a management program for lower urinary tract disease, it is important to ensure that the intended increases in urine volume and decreases in specific gravity actually occur.

Like any study where much of the data is incomplete or old, there are lots of hedge words: "implicated" "suggested" "probably" "may increase" and that sort of thing. But I think it's safe to say that, while the authors wish there was more complete data to work with, they're drawing a logical conclusion from the results of the aggregated studies, which range from observing two dozen or so cats almost a century ago, to studies on 130+ cats in the 1980s.

In other words, the tl;dr version might be: Water = good. Make sure your cat gets enough, either by drinking or with his/her food.

For Gods sake when will the madness end????

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