Fat Cats | Risks with a Raw Diet

By Kim Campbell Thornton the frenchconnection.com

June 7, 2009

Cats are finally starting to get their due. Among the cat-related health and nutrition talks at ACVIM were feline obesity; cats and calcium: the causes and consequences of hypercalcemia; novel proteins and diet formats (read “raw”) for dogs and cats; obesity in cats; the enigma of feline carbohydrate metabolism; and management of feline diabetes: diet, acarbose and problem cats.

I wasn’t able to attend all of these–my brain still hurts from the past few days–but I did takes extensive notes from the proceedings on talks of particular interest. Here’s some of what Kelly Swanson, Ph.D., from Urbana, Illinois, had to say about novel diets:

Despite the current body of evidence that clearly favors mainstream diets, it behooves pet food professionals and veterinarians to understand the rationale behind feeding novel diet formats. Because it is clear that an increasing number of pet owners are feeding home-prepared and/or raw diets, performing proper research on such diets is also of importance. Rather than simply dismissing these diets and/or owners as irrational (as I have heard countless times at scientific meetings), it is time to perform and publish the appropriate research in this area so that decisions may be made based on facts rather than anecdotes.

Feeding nontraditional diets is controversial, but both sides of the argument rely heavily on anecdotal evidence or a small number of case reports. In my opinion, both sources of information have their flaws. While veterinarians must make their decisions based on facts rather than anecdotes, they cannot rely on case reports alone. For every case report demonstrating the risks associated with raw diets, there is a media report describing the latest pet food recall. Until unbiased, properly designed, treatment-based experiments testing such diets have been performed and published in peer-reviewed journals, the argument will continue to be largely based on emotion and anecdotes rather than fact.

Ding ding ding ding ding!

I also spent quite a bit of time talking to Susan Little, DVM, president of the Winn Feline Foundation, about her take on the conference. Here’s what she had to say:

There have been some controversial nutrition topics here, especially today, and sorting through those is going to be difficult for most of the veterinarians. The talk that Dr. Zoran just gave [I'll have proceedings notes on that later] on feline obesity really strongly reinforced what we all should know about cats and obesity. What I liked about her talk and what I think is a big message that we really need to get out is that there should be as much focus on preventing it because it’s so hard to treat. She gave a lot of useful advice to veterinarians about counseling pet owners with kittens. Let’s start talking to pet owners who have kittens and help them prevent cats from getting fat instead of us all waiting until we have 10-pound 10-year-old diabetic cats. I wish there had been more vets in that talk, and I hope the ones that were in there get that take-home message that we need to be proactive.

Did you attend the session on novel diets?

I just came in at the end of that when they were talking about evaluating raw diets in big cats, which is too bad because Winn has just funded a study on feeding raw food diets to kittens. Amazingly enough to me, there’s been very little research done on feeding raw food diets to cats, yet something like 4 to 5 percent of the U.S. population feeds a raw food diet to their cats and nobody’s looking at that. We have a lot of scary information about the safety risks; I think we all recognize that, but nobody’s looked at it to see if there are health benefits. The study Winn has funded at the University of Tennessee is postulating that maybe there are some health benefits, particularly to immunity, maybe. When that study came across our review panel, we were all like ‘Wow, it’s about time.’ We’ve never seen a study presented to us to evaluate raw diets, so it’s way past time to look at some of that stuff.