IBD cats and potatos

Does anyone have any thoughts on feeding pets with IBD food that has potatoes as part of the formula? My last cat also had IBD and for a while he really liked First Mate cat food which I found on IBD kitties and only has a few ingredients and one happens to be potatoes. The vet is recommending he eat hypoallergenic food but he doesn't like the wet and with IBD he should not be eating dry in my opinion. I had some Fancy Feast classic food from my last cat which is also on IBD Kitties so I have been feeding him this food as he doesn't like the other foods.

While researching IBD and foods I found an interesting article that was claiming IBD cats should avoid potatoes...

http://www.naturalcatcareblog.com/2012/09/cat-foodsfor-feline-diarrhea-ibd-cat-throwing-up/

That about vegetables? Do cats need some fiber?

For many IBS or IBD cats, fiber only causes more trouble.

I would avoid them, with one exception, which requires some explanation: Foods high in disaccharides much more readily feed the bad bacteria at the root of inflammatory bowel conditions.

This means we should avoid high-disaccharide ingredients like:

• Potatoes
• Sweet potatoes
• FOS (fructooligosaccharides) – a fiber “prebiotic”

Others claim it is good..

Dietary Management: A food trial using 'hypoallergenic' diets is usually one of the first steps in the initial treatment, and is used to verify the diagnosis. The key is to use a protein source and carbohydrate source the cat has never eaten before, such as duck and potato, or to use a diet consisting of hydrolyzed proteins. The cat must eat nothing else, including treats. If a diet change will help, it will generally start to do so in two weeks.

Or..

Depending on your cat's symptoms, your vet may recommend a bland diet, which in my practice means a grain-free menu of cooked ground turkey and canned pumpkin (pure pumpkin, not the filling used in pies) or cooked sweet potato. I don't like the traditional bland diet of beef and rice, because high-fat beef and the tendency of rice to ferment in the intestines can exacerbate problems in the GI tract and pancreas.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? I want to get him onto a simple food and First Mate is that... http://www.firstmate.com/cat-food/

Their canned limited ingredient food is very simple but now I am a bit concerned about the potato but the link above is the first time I have read this. I am reluctant to try raw with this guy because my last guy had a bad reaction to it and the vet has said that she has seen more issues caused by raw food than corrected.

Thanks for any input.

I searched in the nutrition forum and nothing came up but I think this is more of a health issue so I posted it here.

Mogli has IBD and food allergies (chicken and grain, including rice). He eats limited ingredient Rx food that's up to 3‰ potato, parsnips/turnips or sweet potato on the advice of a certified nutritionist. Food tends to go through him very quickly, and she recommended adding a spoonful of one of the above to any home cooked meals he gets. He didn't do well on LID with peas or hydrolyzed proteins. Raw went right through him.

Honestly, you have to feed your cat whatever works, and no two IBD cats are going to do well on exactly the same diet. For Mogli, a grain-free, low-fat, single-protein canned diet with a few pieces of rabbit & potato or horse & sweet potato dry as snacks has worked where nothing else has.

My cat Simon battled IBD for years, and then had a severe progression of it in the last year and a half of his life before succumbing to an IBD related cancer that IBD can progress into.  Having said that I am going to offer a simple answer to a complicated disease.

If your cat has any combination of diarrhea, vomiting or weight loss, with a diagnosis of IBD then any diet that relieves his symptoms is beating the disease and putting him into remission. End of story (for now).  The list of ingredients is entirely secondary to symptom relief, because relief of symptoms means that the cat's disease is gone (for now because it isn't curable, that's why its called remission).  The disease is not progressing  if the symptoms are controlled.

So if you find a diet, with or without potatoes, that works, then great and you stick with that until (and if) it stops working then you try a new protein.  There is no correlation that i am aware of between dry food and IBD per se.

When all the diets stop working (and or you can't arrest weight loss) then you move on to Prednisilone, a wonder drug that will often put a cat back into remission for some good amount of time.  When (and if) the pred stops working you are in the weeds sadly, and you can try leukeran if your cat will tolerate it, and that's about as far as you can go without getting a positive diagnosis for IBD related cancer (like small cell lymphoma) which the cat will often have by the time the pred stops working. 

WIth my cat, the diagnosis of cancer (in his case a less common one, mast cell internally) the diagnosis (which can be difficult to obtain and took 2 needle aspirates of his lymph nodes months apart) came too late and he died of complications of the disease before a specific mast cell chemo could have an effect.

So having said all that, it comes back to finding a diet that relieves the symptoms.  If he won't eat any of them, or if none of them work then you have to move on to the pred (basically that is about the only next decent option).  However, if you want to consider a full thickness (intestinal) biopsy for a definitive diagnosis (which you may or may not obtain by the way) you have to do that before starting the Pred therapy.  And it is ok to treat presumptively without the biopsy, many people do that and it is completely acceptable.

Good luck, keep us updated, and I hope you have many happy years with him.  Every moment is precious and there is never enough time.

Krissy has IBD and pancreatitis, and for 6 months now she has been on Blue Buffalo Basics, LID turkey and potato dry food, and twice a day has fancy feast classics turkey.

So far so good.

I have found she is allergic to chicken and fish altogether.

Thanks for the input and sadly I am familiar with IBD kitties as my last one who just passed away after 20 years did so because of IBD complications. This guy is just coming up on 3 years old and I adopted him because he had IBD so I thought I would research IBD again and see if I had missed anything. It seems to be a common theme that a lot of people don't like hard food because it is harder for the animal to digest and because wet food is like their natural diet it can reduce some of the issues with IBD. My last cat was brought up on Iams hard food until he was 17 when he refused to eat dry food and basically switched himself to wet when he started to show symptoms of IBD. It also seems that feeding the animal more small meals throughout the day makes it easier for them to digest because they are going with smaller amounts at a time instead of big meals once or twice. That;s interesting about the hard food though, I will have to look into this further because I do have a hypoallergenic food that this guy had when he came from the SPCA and he will eat it. So far I have only seen minimal IBD signs from this guy when he has been in my care but his medical issues show something else entirely. Stress can also cause IBD and he did live with two other dogs and now he lives with humans only so here is to hoping it is more stress related than food.

One of our cats can't seem to eat potato: she doesn't have IBD, though she does have a sensitive stomach and potato seems to make her gassy and barfy. Those problems pretty much went away when all the potato came out of the cats' diet. I remember that a couple other TCS members said their cats can't tolerate potato, either.

On the other hand, our previous cat ate a lot of Weruva food with potato (Steak Frites was a favorite) in her final months; she wasn't definitively diagnosed for IBD because she was frail from other conditions but she had presumptive IBD and lymphoma and very little appetite. Her symptoms lessened considerably after taking all the grains and fish out of her diet... but potato seemed to agree with her.

As others have said, it's whatever works that works!

Thanks everyone, I will give it a try and see how it works out with him. My last guy was frail and skinny and he could go from eating almost nothing a day to 6 small cans of food depending how he felt and he was around 7lbs. No matter what I fed him he would throw up on average every three days and he was on pred and Cerenia. The Cerenia was in pill form and as soon as I switched to injections he felt much better and stopped throwing up and when he passed on he was at 70 days without throwing up. Currently this guy is stable but I would like to make sure he stays that way and I don't want to feed him Fancy Feast if I can avoid it.

You would be surprised at Fancy Feast classics, and their lack of garbage. 

Just saying, I am particular about what my cats are fed, and since they will eat FF and do fine along with their BB turkey, then that's what they get.

I don't think the same for all FF either.

The ones I feed have no carrageenan either.

But to each his own

Good luck with this kitty!

@catwoman Do you mean the FF Classic Turkey and Giblets? 

All right I give up, how do you do the @ thing, mine never comes up blue.

@Reba: it took me a while to get the hang of the @ thing, too! On a desktop, you type the @ and then start typing the name... a menu will come up on your screen, showing possible names to choose. I've never tried using it on my tablet so don't know how/if it works in mobile mode. 

Good luck!