You May Want to Reconsider Your Pet’s Prescription Diet

Cat and mouse

Fern Slack, DVM, first noticed something was amiss with the sick cats she was seeing regularly when many seemed to have the same exact kibble-style diet. “A disproportionate number were eating cat chow and I just started wondering. And that wondering led me slowly down this path to where I am now. Cats are obligate carnivores, they eat prey in the wild,” Slack shared.

Slack spent ten years in critical care, followed by general practice. She is now the medical director for Uniquely Cats, a Veterinary Center in Boulder specializing in all-mouse diets for cats. “I had come to feel that so many of the diseases I see are food-induced. Back in my years of critical care, I used to unblock three or four cats every night. Here, since we opened in 2017, we’ve had three cats come in with urinary tract obstructions, and all three were new patients.” Slack admitted that diet does not cure all, but it plays a major role in the physical well-being of your furry friend, and switching cats to a diet of raw mice yielded drastic improvements.

Slack shared that her veterinary center saw a virtual elimination of obesity and urinary tract infections in cats after using a diet of mice, problems she regularly encountered in the past. Felines as a whole are obligate carnivores, meaning they need to eat a diet of almost entirely meat to be healthy and cannot obtain what they need from plants. Your pet cat is no exception, however, so many ingredients found in traditional cat chow-style feed are not meat. “Cats eat mice, but cat food is made out of plants, and that is true even when the label claims would suggest far otherwise,” Fern said.

Prescribing diets, proscribing raw

Many pet owners have come across the pitch for prescription diets at some point by a veterinarian. The idea is an attractive one — pet food researchers have spent decades seeking out the best science, collaborating with top food companies, and getting feedback from veterinarians and animal hospitals across the nation. This, they will tell you, has led to a specific catered diet that can help cure your feline friend of a certain ailment. It appears that any caring pet owner would be foolish to ignore this advice.

Examining it further can raise questions — is any animal supposed to eat the same processed meal for its entire life? “What if you went to your cardiologist and you had an echocardiogram and the cardiologist said here’s a box of cereal you need to eat this and nothing else for the rest of your life, or you will die?” Slack opined.

“Pet food companies underwrite most of the work, if not all of it, that’s done in nutritional departments of most vet schools now. So they control what gets looked at. They gate what gets published,” Slack lamented. It doesn’t end with education. “Students and vets are told, or have it implied to them, that there’s a prescription diet for every condition. There’s nothing prescription about them. It’s very hard to get people to believe that the food is as bad as it is.”

When it comes to counting what meat is even previously dead or diseased cows, chickens, and other feed animals may be included. Concerningly, the website TruthAboutPetFood.com shared a PDF response from the FDA that communicated the following: “We do not believe that the use of diseased animals or animals that died otherwise than by slaughter to make animal food poses a safety concern and we intend to continue to exercise enforcement discretion.”

A reason prescription pet diets may be so popular is likely because they are profitable, not necessarily because they are the best solution to a health problem. “Veterinarians are not traditionally very profitable. They don’t generate tons of money. What does generate tons of money is the sale of prescription diets. They can dictate which prescription diet should be sold. And there’s where your money is.”

Deeper than you think

Insidiously, it is not just that generic pet food is bad for their digestive systems and overall health, it is the profitable feedback loop of poor diets leading to prescribed diets that keeps massive corporations making money off of veterinarians and animal hospitals. There is a real financial interest in corporations continuing to peddle food not meant for cats, dogs, and other beloved animals. Slack agreed. “It’s amazing how this whole behemoth of the pet food industry has risen over the years, and now, how it has become integrated with the veterinary world to the extent that the conflict of interest is insane.”

Publicly available information shows that massive conglomerate corporations — often associated with candy brands more than health food — own the entire process from testing, to manufacture, to food recommendation. Mars Inc. for one example, owns both Waltham and Royal Canin— nutritional research centers for pets, Pedigree and Whiskas  — massive pet food manufacturers, plus VCA, BluePearl, as well as Banfeild — some of the largest networks of animal hospitals in the nation.

Slack follows the PR and communication put out by the pet food industry regularly to keep herself and her patients informed about their sometimes shady tactics. “This one article described a method that would provide a kibble with a very irregular shape that if you put it in a can and put gravy on it, it would look like meat. So people would open the can of food and think they were looking at meat chunks. The article was not entitled ‘How to Defraud Your Consumer,’ but that was precisely what it was. The pet food industry is full of stuff like that.”

What do wild animals eat naturally?

Always consult with your trusted veterinarian before changing diets. Omnivores need much more balance and variety than carnivores do. Additionally, food allergies and intolerances exist in animals just like in humans.

Cats

• All felines are carnivores and require a diet of meat. Lions, cheetahs, cougars, and cats all have similar requirements and small digestive tracts that process animal products quickly.
• Domestic cats eat animals smaller than them, mainly mice and birds. Cats are some of the best hunters in the animal kingdom and are required to eat meat.

Dogs

• Dogs in their natural habitat, like their wolf ancestors, require a diet of mostly animal products, but not exclusively so.
• Unlike felines, canines are extremely opportunistic eaters who can not only tolerate but require fruits and vegetables as a small part of their diet in addition to hunting and scavenging.

Rabbits

• Wild rabbits’ diets consist mainly of fresh grasses, green leaves, and small plants like dandelions.
• Obviously, rabbits do not eat meat (Monty Python excepted) but despite the stereotype, even carrots are too sugary and not a healthy part of their nutrition.

Horses

• Wild horses are natural grazers, with teeth and a digestive tract designed for the long slow process of breaking down plants, just like domestic ones.
• Leaves, shrubs, flowers, and the occasional patch of fruit make up the majority of their wild meals. They eat nearly continuously, with no “meal times.”

Birds

• Although some birds are carnivorous, almost all pet birds like parrots and canaries require a balance of seeds, fruits, nuts, and vegetables with no meat.
• Birds like Hawks, Owls, and Falcons should never be kept as pets as they are undomesticated predators who eat meat and other birds.

Gut health, mind health

So what is actually in your pet’s bag of food? “Virtually every commercially manufactured pet food that currently exists is monetized trash from human production.” Uniquely Cats does not sell any cat food themselves but can recommend some local manufacturers and purveyors they have vetted. As for mass-produced bag-style food, “It isn’t meat at all. Ingredients might be product meal, which is feathers, legs, and beaks, all ground up and put in there. There’s no meat. Or it’s chicken fat, which is not meat. But it fools people because it’s intended to fool people,” Slack opened up. “I’m hoping that the current data on ultra-processed foods in the human world might spill over into the awareness of the veterinary world at some point.”

One of the major changes in human-related diet science has been in the gut. Science has repeatedly shown the deep connection between physical health and a healthy biome, but that has not yet extended widely into the pet world. “We really didn’t have awareness of microbiome science back in 2017, in the veterinary world. But now we do, and a lot of the human work in microbiome science is starting to make sense of all the changes we see in the veterinary world,” she shared her hopes for future research and acceptance.

Slack explained how some of the research in microbiology could apply to pet food. “The general thought in microbiome science in humans right now is that every species evolves eating a particular diet and that diet induces an intestinal microbiome that is evolutionarily natural to that species.”

Unfortunately, it is not just humans in the West, and especially in the U.S., who are packing on the pounds. Switching to mainly processed foods has disastrous results for humans, changing an animal’s natural diet likely has similar negative repercussions. “When you depart from that diet, you induce a different population of organisms in the gut, and that’s dysbiosis, and that in many ways induces inflammatory bowel disease, diabetes, and obesity all the things that plague the Western world because our diet is not evolutionarily natural. We eat a lot of ultra-processed foods that aren’t normal based on the time of year.”

No rational person would prescribe an ailing human a diet of a single processed product, that same logic may need to be applied to our non-human family members as well. There is hope for those like Slack who support a natural diet for pets. Just this past February, an Illinois class action lawsuit in progress stated that prescription pet food manufactured by Hill’s Nutritional Pet Food — also owned by a corporate conglomerate — “is deceptive under the Illinois Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act (“Act”) because the products do not contain a drug or medicine and are not actual prescription products legally required to be sold by prescription.” It goes on to claim that marketing tactics were illegal as well.

The more pet owners and lovers that become aware of the multi-national corporate influence, the lack of quality and possible deception involved in food manufacturing and marketing, and the reality of what animals need to eat to maintain a healthy internal ecosystem, the more change and positive benefit we can bring our domestic animals.