Lots of special diets exist for cats. These diets may be recommended by veterinarians or pet store staff based upon life stage, lifestyle, breed, or known medical problems. How useful are they? How strict must one be when feeding the die...
Lots of special diets exist for cats. These diets may be recommended by veterinarians or pet store staff based upon life stage, lifestyle, breed, or known medical problems. How useful are they? How strict must one be when feeding the diets to cats?
This article will focus primarily on the diets designed to treat medical problems. These diets are known as prescription diets because they most often are used on the recommendation of a veterinarian. In the past these diets were only available through veterinarians; in the Internet age, it is now possible to purchase most of them online and often from pet stores.
But before we delve into the prescription diets, I want to touch briefly upon the life stage, lifestyle, and breed-based diets mentioned above. Special diets exist for kittens, elderly cats, indoor cats, outdoor cats, Persians, Siameses, and many other cats who can be shoehorned into some category or other. These diets have been tweaked to "fit" the age, lifestyle, or breed of the targeted individual (for instance, kitten diets contain more calories than adult maintenance diets). However, it is my opinion that most of them, and especially the breed-based ones, are more marketing ploys than good-faith efforts to better serve cats and their owners. I'm generally not a fan of them.
Cat licking her chops by Shutterstock.">
Cat licking her chops by Shutterstock.">
Cat licking her chops by Shutterstock.
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What about prescription diets? These diets are manufactured by a few different companies. Hills, Purina, and Royal Canin are the market leaders. These diets are produced to address issues such as obesity, pregnancy, diabetes, urinary problems, skin problems, kidney disease, thyroid disease, intestinal problems, and pregnancy. Some of them seem to work better than others. A discussion of all of them is beyond the scope of this article, so I will focus on four of the most commonly used classes of prescription diets: those used to treat kidney disease, diabetes, intestinal problems, and urinary problems.
The ordering of the four classes that I just listed is not a coincidence. I have listed the diets in order of, in my opinion, increasing importance and efficacy.
Prescription diets for kidney disease
It may surprise many people to learn that I am not terribly impressed with prescription diets designed to treat kidney disease. Since kidney disease is one of the most common medical conditions in cats, kidney formulas (such as Hills k/d, Purina NF, and Royal Canin Veterinary Renal LP) are very commonly used.
The logic behind their use goes like this: It is the job of the kidneys to remove waste products from the bloodstream. The primary waste products they remove are the result of protein metabolism. Protein contains significant quantities of nitrogen and phosphorus, and the waste products that build up in the body with kidney disease are high in nitrogen and phosphorus. These waste products cause cats to feel sick. Therefore, kidney formula diets are low in protein to reduce the levels of these products and also to reduce the "workload" of the kidneys.
That sounds good in theory, but it appears there may be a flaw in the logic. Namely, cats' bodies have very little control over their protein metabolism. This means that their bodies may be prone to metabolizing a similar amount of protein no matter how much of it they eat. Some experts therefore believe that kidney formula diets do not significantly reduce the workload of the kidneys, nor do they delay the progression of kidney disease.
White and gray cat with food by Shutterstock.">
