Diabetes and Obesity: Preventable Epidemics

Please note that not all cats that consume substantial dry cat food become obese, or develop diabetes, or idiopathic cystitis, at least not during the length of their lives, whatever that might be. Similarly, not all cats that consumed taurine-deficient canned foods in the 1980s developed congestive cardiomyopathy, at least not before the link to canned foods was discovered and corrected. We know that as harmful as cigarette smoking clearly is for human beings, not every person that smokes cigarettes will develop cancer, or emphysema, or heart disease, at least not before some other cause of death intervenes. These facts do not diminish in the slightest the unavoidable conclusions we have come to about the harmfulness of cigarette smoking, and the dangerousness of nutritionally deficient or excessive diets. Some people and animals are more resistant to environmental harms than others, but it is virtually impossible to tell which individuals these are before it is too late. Therefore, every individual in every susceptible population must be considered at risk.

 

What is to be done about the present rampant feeding of carbohydrate-laden dry cat foods? Shouldn't those who are gaining financially from the present high level of commercial pet food demand and who have the expertise to formulate and produce truly healthful feline diets, do so? Of course they should. The pet food companies that have set themselves up as the pet nutritional experts among us have the obligation to deliver the safety and efficacy they have been claiming for so long.

 

Unfortunately, without intense consumer pressure, that is highly unlikely to happen.⁵ All pet food companies have enormous investments in their current dry formulations and the long term purchase of ingredients that will make up those foods. All have huge dry cat food plants and a customer base that they will not willingly convert to better types of food with smaller profit margins. Had Dr. Pion not discovered the taurine-deficiency connection to certain canned cat foods, and threatened the implicated companies with scathing public relations consequences if diet formulations were not immediately revamped and improved, we would still be treating congestive cardiomyopathy as a fatal disease of cats of "unknown etiology." Because of Dr. Pion's discovery and willingness to speak out loudly, feline congestive cardiomyopathy is essentially a historical disease today.

 

If you worry about switching forms of food because you have been convinced that dry food is essential to good dental health for your cat, consider this: veterinarians today, whose feline patients are almost always consuming dry food as their complete or nearly complete diet, are seeing as much oral and dental disease in their patients as ever before. While the feeding of a crunchy kibble may have an intuitive appeal for dental health, the reality is that there are no scientific studies that prove dry foods provide better dental health throughout a cat's life than wet foods do. In my practice, I have a majority of my patients consuming exclusively wet diets. My patients require no more regular dental care and experience no more disease of their teeth and gums than patients on other practices in which I have worked where dry food was the norm. There is no dental benefit from dry food that even begins to offset the terrible harm done from feeding the wrong metabolic fuel to our cats.

 

It is for us, all of us, to do as Dr. Pion did back in the late 1980s. This article is the beginning of what I hope will become a groundswell of support to apply intense and constant pressure on the companies that supply our cat foods. I call for all of you to think long and hard about whether you really believe your cats are doing well on "Fritos®, chips and breakfast cereal." Those of you with obese and/or diabetic cats, consider that your cats would most certainly be more fit and healthier had they not lived on junk food all their lives. If you hesitate to seriously consider making a change from dry food because kibble is so convenient and easy to feed, please consider what this convenience is costing your cat. Until the veterinary profession becomes more knowledgeable about feline nutrition, and the pet food industry faces and corrects the defects within its present dry formulations, you are your cat's only real advocate for nutritional health. So speak up!

 

 

Elizabeth M. Hodgkins, DVM, JD, has been a veterinarian since 1977, and currently runs a cat-only practice in Yorba Linda, California. After veterinary school at UC-Davis, she served as the director of technical affairs at Hill's Pet Nutrition, the largest proprietary pet food manufacturer in the world. It was there that she developed the passion for veterinary nutrition that drove her later investigations into this subject, particularly the causes and management of feline diabetes and obesity. "Feline Diabetes and Obesity: The Preventable Epidemics" originally appeared on Your Diabetic Cat and is re-posted here with Dr. Hodgkin's kind permission.

 

 

  1. It is true that some canned foods, especially those that have low protein and/or low fat content (e.g. those that purport to be helpful in such disease conditions as renal failure or urolithiasis), are not well accepted by cats. This is because of their extremely abnormal macronutrient profiles for an obligatory carnivore. Other canned foods have high levels of indigestible fiber (wood cellulose), supposedly because this slows the absorption of sugar and calories from the food in which it is included. This is supposed to assist in the control of overweight and/or diabetes. The foods do neither very well. High fiber diets, canned and dry, limit the digestion and absorption of many vital nutrients, especially in a species with a short gastrointestinal tract and limited capability to extract nutrients from vegetation. They represent an irrational approach to meeting the nutritional needs of the overweight or diabetic cat and contain egregious amounts of simple carbohydrate, including carbohydrate and sugar from corn.

 

  2. P. D. Pion, M. D. Kittleson, W. P. Thomas, L. A. Delellis, and Q. R. Rogers, "Response of Cats with Dilated Cardiomyopathy to Taurine Supplementation," Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 201(2), Jul 15, 1992, 275-284.

 

  3. M. Funaba, A. Uchiyama, K. Takahashi, M. Kaneko, H. Yamamoto, K. Namikawa, T. Iriki, Y. Hatano, and M. Abe, "Evaluation of Effects of Dietary Carbohydrate on Formation of Struvite Crystals in Urine and Macromineral Balance in Clinically Normal Cats," American Journal of Veterinary Research 65, no. 2, February 2004, 138-142. So-called "idiopathic cystitis" of cats is also directly related to high carbohydrate intake, not excessive mineral intake or inadequate water intake as has been advanced by pet food nutritionists for decades. Thus, this makes another entirely preventable epidemic in our cats caused by poor nutrition.

 

  4. It is important to note that the canned foods of the Iams Company were never implicated in the taurine-deficiency scandal of the late 1980s.This was believed to be the result of that company's fortuitous use of significantly greater amounts of fish in their canned cat food products than most other companies. Fish is rich in taurine, and Iams' canned cat foods contained enough extra taurine to withstand harmful inactivation of that nutrient in the retort process. Further, the Iams Company more than any other has long insisted that the cat is a carnivore and should be fed as such. This is clearly the right idea; unfortunately the Iams Company's dry foods are bursting with highly processed carbohydrate like every other company's. To properly feed an obligatory carnivore like the cat, one needs include not only adequate amounts of unique essential micronutrients like taurine, Vitamin A and arachidonic acid, but one needs also to include adequate levels of vital macronutrients like protein and fat, and exclude harmful levels of carbohydrate. In short, one would need to feed a diet very like the one which provided the millennia of evolutionary pressures that produced today's domestic felines. No presently available dry cat food comes even close to this standard.