Has anyone tried adding Stevia to cat food?

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Darlene & Jack

Darlene & Jack

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I was at Barnes & Noble last night poking around and went to the pet section. Found a holistic book on cats and was reading about diabetes. One of the suggestions to decrease insulin needs was to take liquid Stevia (a drop mixed in a teaspoon of water) and add a drop of this mixture to each meal. Continue to check blood sugars and give insulin, and slowly increase the amount of Stevia added. They say the insulin needs should decrease as the amount of Stevia you add increases.

I have no idea if this works or not, I only found one article about it on Google. Cinnamon powder was also mentioned as a treatment.

Just wondering if anyone has heard of this or has tried it. (I'm NOT endorsing this or suggesting it...just checking in to see if anyone else has heard of it)
 
Yes, i know it is a sweetener. It is not meant to add to just sweeten the food, but apparently there is some herbal connection to lower the blood sugar.

http://www.ehow.com/way_5630027_alterna ... ments.html

This is the only article I could find mentioning it for cats, other than the book is was looking at. Here is another article on it's use in humans, as it has properties that help stimulate the natural release of insulin and the bodies response to glucose.

http://www.replacesugar.com/diabetes.htm
 
OK, just scanned those over.

My thoughts:

If you want to rest the pancreas in hopes it may recover to diet-controlled diabetes, then stevia would be counter-productive for that as it pushes insulin production.

If you have a Type 1 diabetic, it will be unhelpful for that - there is no insulin production.

If you want to use it to see what it does for your cat, I'd encourage serious data collection of anything you can measure at home, (and coordination with your vet, in case anything becomes known in the way of adverse affects). Good data would let you plot test results by doseage levels so you could see visually what was ocurring, as well as use statistical tests to see if it was likely by chance or not. And, if you were working wth the vet, possibly a published article in a vet journal, as a case study.
 
I'm not trying it, I was just asking if anyone had tried it and if they had any success with it. So many cats seem to get OTJ so they do still have a working pancreas, it seems this would encourage the pancreas to produce the insulin on it's own rather than need an outside source of insulin.

And if you look at Jack's spreadsheet...we collect tons of data! lol
 
The idea of giving insulin to kitties instead of giving a pill like glipside (or stevia) that stimulates the pancreas is to give the pancreas a break so it can heal itself. A damaged kitty pancreas lays down a protein layer in it that will never go away. The pancreas has to learn to work around it. If you tax the pancreas too much over too long a time, there is too much damage and it cannot learn to work around it and will always need help.
 
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