My vet recommended dry food for my newly diagnosed diabetic cat?

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Mewmewkit

Mewmewkit

Member Since 2021
Hello,
New here! My 14yr old cat mew mew was just diagnosed with diabetes. The vet recommended hills prescription diet glucosupport m/d dry food.i am extremely confused as I thought dry food was determental due to carbs? Is this a low carb food? Is it ok? I wasn't speaking directly to the vet at the appt it was the vet tech and I brought up this concern. She didn't really seem to understand. Anyway I had her have the vet write a script for the wet food just in case....so I plan on picking it up. But they said they wanted the dry food to be 80% of her diet!
Also blood glucose monitors. Cats have 7% plasma level and humans 42% ( or something like that) so if I use a human monitor for testing will this effect the results? Is there some kind of conversion?
And lastly, can I feed my kit small portions of protein like chicken, tuna, beef as a snack throughout the day? Will this effect her glucose levels?
Thank you for taking the time to read and respond
 
Hi and welcome to you and Mew Mew.
No you don’t need to feed the prescription dry food. You are correct, it is too high carbs. Feeding that would be like feeding ice cream and biscuits, giving insulin and hoping the blood glucose would go down!
You need to be feeding a wet/ canned diet, 10% or under carbs. It is far better for all cats whether diabetic or not.
Here is a link to suitable foods. Look for 10% or under carbs
https://catinfo.org/docs/CatFoodProteinFatCarbPhosphorusChart.pdf

A human meter is absolutely fine to test a cat with. Most of us here use human meters. Pet meters are very expensive to run...a lot more expensive than human meters.
All vets used human meters until the last several years when pet meters became available.
Our dosing methods are based on the human meter.
You don’t need any conversion chart for the human meter. The normal cat range on a human meter is 50-120
So go ahead and use the human meter quite confidently.
I would suggest you think about setting up a spreadsheet. Here is a link to ours. You can then put in all the data and we can help you with dosing.
If u have any trouble setting it up @Bandit's Mom will help I am sure.

https://www.felinediabetes.com/FDMB/forums/spreadsheets-tech-support-testing-area.6/
Yes, you can feed your kitty small snacks throughout the day.
We recommend feeding before the insulin shot, and again during the first half of the cycle (first 6 or 7 hours after the shot) giving 2 or 3 small snacks.

What type of insulin are you giving? And the dose?
What type of insulin depends on how long you need to wait before giving the dose.
Most cats start on around 1 unit of insulin twice a day.

Looking forward to hearing back from you.
Bron
 
Hello! Thank you for your response. We are giving her 1 unit of lantis every 12 hours to start. Yesterday her sugar was 449 at the vet before insulin. I haven't tested her yet at home after her injection. She recieved her second insulting shot this morning at 530a and we gave it about a 15kins after she ate the prescription dry food. But she didn't even eat the whole thing.
 
Mewmewkit said:
Hello! Thank you for your response. We are giving her 1 unit of lantis every 12 hours to start. Yesterday her sugar was 449 at the vet before insulin. I haven't tested her yet at home after her injection. She recieved her second insulting shot this morning at 530a and we gave it about a 15kins after she ate the prescription dry food. But she didn't even eat the whole thing.
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I unit is a good starting dose but the only way of knowing that it is the correct dose is by testing before and during the cycles.

Are you testing with a pet meter or a human meter?
I would recommend testing before every shot to see it is safe to give the dose.
Cats blood glucose varies a lot during every day and night and doesn’t stay the same.

When you swap over from the high carb dry food you are feeding at the moment, you will need to be testing and monitoring the blood glucose closely as they can drop by more than 100 points with the removal of the high carb food. If you are not monitoring closely and adjusting the insulin dose, you are risking a hypo.

I will give you the spreadsheet link. You might like to set that up. It is a great way of keeping track of the data and is the only way we can help you with dosing.
https://www.felinediabetes.com/FDMB/forums/spreadsheets-tech-support-testing-area.6/

Cats often test higher at the vet due to stress so it is possible that Mew Mew is running a bit lower at home.
With Lantus you can test, feed and shoot in that order one after the other. Lantus doesn’t onset for around two hours.
It is ok if she doesn’t eat all the food at once, as long as she will keep eating during the cycle.
 
So I have a human meter that I was using before to check my own blood sugar. I'm not using it anymore and was gonna use that on her. I haven't tested her yet at home. We had taken her off dry food completely except allowing her to graze a little through the day (as a back up when we weren't home) and her main source of food was wet. But days would go by with her not even touching the dry food. We reintroduced the dry because the vet sent us home with the hills science gluco support m/d and told us to only feed her that. She's had two servings of it so far.
What monitor would you recommend human or pet? And if pet is the alphatrack 2 any better than like the petsmart meter?
 
Mewmewkit said:
So I have a human meter that I was using before to check my own blood sugar. I'm not using it anymore and was gonna use that on her. I haven't tested her yet at home. We had taken her off dry food completely except allowing her to graze a little through the day (as a back up when we weren't home) and her main source of food was wet. But days would go by with her not even touching the dry food. We reintroduced the dry because the vet sent us home with the hills science gluco support m/d and told us to only feed her that. She's had two servings of it so far.
What monitor would you recommend human or pet? And if pet is the alphatrack 2 any better than like the petsmart meter?
Click to expand...
I would definitely recommend the human meter.
The pet meter is very expensive to run. I much prefer the human meter quite apart from the cost to run it.
Make sure your test strips are still in date.
I would start testing her now so you know what is happening.
There is nothing special about the Hills gluco support m/d dry food. It is high carb and has nothing in it that remotely helps feline diabetes. It is the big pet food manufacturers who educate the vets on feeding cats and dogs and of course they promote their own foods.
Ordinary canned cat food with 10% or under carbs is much more suitable.
But only swap over fully to the low carb when you are testing.
 
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