Jackson The Loving
Member Since 2018
Hello - My cat Jackson was diagnosed with diabetes three weeks ago. He's started on Lantus and I've been working on getting better canned and dry food choices into the household. I've got four cats and for one I haven't yet got her to delve into anything canned, but I continue to work on that as I'd like to elimate as much dry food as possible from the household.
Jackson is now on three canned meals a day and he gets Halo Indoor Cat Grain-Free Turkey & Duck, which the manufacturer tells me is .01% carbohydrates. For dry, we re in the process of transitioning over 7 days to Wellness Core Natural Grain-Free Original Turkey, Turkey Meal & Chicken Meal Dry Cat Food. If you go to the manufacturer's web site and download the nutitional info PDF file, you'll see the the carbohydrates are 13.04% As Fed and 14.17% Dry Matter bases. This is lower than the Pro Plan Veterinary DM dry.
If you look into these brands, you'll find the carbs very alot by specific product. For example when talking to the Wellness Core folks, one of their dry products was 35% carbs, another 25%, so the exact formulation does make a difference.
As stated elsewhere on this forum and as you vet should be able to tell you, changing to much lower carb foods may well result in a big drop in blood glucose levels. So work with your vet on this and be sure you are testing frequently and doing glucose curves. My vet's had me do two in the last couple of weeks to help keep a close eye on this. You don't want your cat to get very dangerous hypoglycemia nor do you want a Somogyi effect happening.
One thing about buying food from Petco and Petsmart which I just caught onto recently - their prices for the same product in the store may well be more than their online price. Take a snapshot of the online price you want them to match up to the cash register when you buy in the store. I've saved up to 30 cents a can sometimes by doing this. Best to all-
Jackson is now on three canned meals a day and he gets Halo Indoor Cat Grain-Free Turkey & Duck, which the manufacturer tells me is .01% carbohydrates. For dry, we re in the process of transitioning over 7 days to Wellness Core Natural Grain-Free Original Turkey, Turkey Meal & Chicken Meal Dry Cat Food. If you go to the manufacturer's web site and download the nutitional info PDF file, you'll see the the carbohydrates are 13.04% As Fed and 14.17% Dry Matter bases. This is lower than the Pro Plan Veterinary DM dry.
If you look into these brands, you'll find the carbs very alot by specific product. For example when talking to the Wellness Core folks, one of their dry products was 35% carbs, another 25%, so the exact formulation does make a difference.
As stated elsewhere on this forum and as you vet should be able to tell you, changing to much lower carb foods may well result in a big drop in blood glucose levels. So work with your vet on this and be sure you are testing frequently and doing glucose curves. My vet's had me do two in the last couple of weeks to help keep a close eye on this. You don't want your cat to get very dangerous hypoglycemia nor do you want a Somogyi effect happening.
One thing about buying food from Petco and Petsmart which I just caught onto recently - their prices for the same product in the store may well be more than their online price. Take a snapshot of the online price you want them to match up to the cash register when you buy in the store. I've saved up to 30 cents a can sometimes by doing this. Best to all-
