dry vs wet food

[bertrand1952]

My 15 year old kitty Tootsie has just been diagnosed with feline diabetes. Our vet strongly recommended she be on wet food only. Right now she is being fed Medi-cal Reduced Protein (wet and dry) as we have 3 other cats, one of whom has creatinine issues. We decided to feed all of them the same food for ease of feeding. Switching to something like Purina DM would not work for our kitty with creatinine problem. Is the Medi-cal dry food really that much of an issue with her insulin intake?? I know the labels show a higher level of protein in the dry. Any comments/suggestions. Thanks

 

[Jen & Squeak]

welcome

*note I cannot use proper punctuation as my keyboard is wonky*

what degree of creatine issue are we talking about

if it is not bad you do not actually need to reduce protein and you should definitely not be feeding dry

please come back with more info

jen

 

[Lisa dvm]

Our vet strongly recommended she be on wet food only.

Smart vet..... but that comment should also apply to *all* feline members of your household.

Please see the Feeding Your Cat/Diabetes/Urinary Tract Health pages below to learn why feeding any cat a water-depleted (all dry foods....) diet is definitely not in their best interest - especially any cat with renal insufficiency.

The role of the kidney in the body is to save water for proper hydration and to make a concentrated urine to get rid of the body's 'trash'. Feeding a dry food diet (5-10% water) versus a canned food diet (>78% water) is only making matters worse.

And no....they don't make up the water deficit at the water bowl no matter how many trips they make to it. This is because cats have a low thirst drive and are designed to get water *with* their food since there prey is 70-75% water.

 

[Susie and Moochie]

If I may, I would like to add that from a strictly diabetic POV, without dealing with all of the other possibilities, that I truly believe my Moochie is a fine example of dry food not being a good diet for cats. Moochie has been diabetic for over four years now and still eats dry food because she absolutely refuses wet. Since she has other issues I gave up on the wet because one of her issues is hunger striking and it just is too high a risk to continue to try to force her.

That said, Moochie gets 0.5U of Levemir BID which IMHO is a ridiculously low dose for a dry foodie. Her preshot numbers are almost always in the 150-180 range. I firmly believe that if she ate wet food she would not need exogenous insulin.

More than you wanted to know, I'm sure, but glad your vet has recommended wet food