Beg Diets & Dcm

[Weasel21]

Some of you may know that the FDA is investigating links between boutique, exotic, and grain-free diets and dilated cardiomyopathy, particularly in dogs. It's not so much the fact that the diets contain exotic proteins or that they have no grains... it's more about the fact that many of these diets substitute grains with pulses (peas, lentils, chickpeas, and dry beans) and potatoes (including potatoes) and also use plant-based proteins to boost the appearance of protein content of the foods. The current thought is that these particular ingredients may decrease the bioavailability of taurine. They also avoid animal by-products, which are higher in taurine than human-grade animal protein. (Here's a good article with more details: Special topic: The association between pulse ingredients and canine dilated cardiomyopathy: addressing the knowledge gaps before establishing causation 1)

The FDA has hundreds of reports from dogs, and only a handful from cats (see: FDA Provides Update on Investigation into Potential Connection Between Certain Diets and Cases of Canine Heart Disease). Because of this, many people are concerned with this only being a dog problem. Here's my question for you: Despite the lack of reports for cats, why should this be of concern only for dogs? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Cats with DCM potentially associated with BEG diets could very well be underreported. Cats behave very differently than dogs. Cats are prey for larger animals, and as such tend to hide their illnesses very well (at least better than dogs). Many cats that have heart problems do not show it until it has reached a critical point, and sad to say but many cats suddenly drop dead from their heart problems before the owner even realizes that they have a problem. Even if they do get rushed to a vet when they reach a critical point, just being at a vet clinic adds significant stress for cats, which worsens their prognosis and the chance that they will survive the initial heart failure episode. I would be surprised if the majority of cats with heart problems ever got a specific diagnosis, and with HCM being more common than DCM, I think most unexpected deaths of cats are chalked up to HCM without a necropsy to back it.

The other reason for fewer cat reports could be related to culture surrounding cats. It's generally deemed acceptable to have an outdoor or indoor/outdoor cat. Most of the time, free roaming cats hunt wild prey (birds, reptiles & amphibians, rodents). These cats, even if they are fed a BEG diet indoors, are supplementing their taurine with wild-caught prey, free of any ingredients that would reduce the bioavailability of taurine.

My cats were indoor only cats, who I had since they were 5 weeks old. They were on a grain-free diet their entire lives, until diagnosis of DCM (2 weeks apart from one another) last September/October. One passed in October, the other in January. Sad to say that peas or pea protein was high in the ingredient list on all of the foods that I fed them.

My veterinarian discouraged testing taurine for my cats, and I bought into it. They insisted that because the cat was fed a commercial diet, and all commercial diets are supplemented with taurine, that my cats' DCM was not diet related. It's possible that it may have been unrelated. But given the current information on dogs, I can't say that it was not diet related. Even if I had taurine plasma levels measured, dogs with DCM are reporting normal taurine levels, and just because the plasma level is normal doesn't mean that the heart is not taurine deficient.

I encourage all of you to think critically about the food you feed. Don't think of it in terms of grain-free or grain inclusive. We know cats don't need grains. But think about what they are substituting for grains. Think about whether or not that might inflate the protein content, despite plant proteins not being bioavailable for cats, so that your apparently high protein food might actually be significantly lower in bioavailable protein than you think. Think about whether or not those ingredients could decrease the bioavailability of other important nutrients in the food.

And don't take absence of evidence as evidence of absence. I'm not saying that BEG diets are bad for cats. I'm saying that you can't judge whether or not it's bad for cats based on a sample size of 6; soon to be 8, as I am in the process of submitting medical records for my cats to the FDA so that they have more data available to look at, to hopefully be able to draw clearer conclusions in the future. I also encourage anyone who has had any cats with confirmed diagnosed DCM fed a BEG diet to report it to the FDA so that they have more data to look at (message me if you need info on how to report).

Would love to have a discussion on everyone's thoughts on the matter.

 

[LTS3]

Here is additional info on boutique diets and taurine deficiency, mostly in dogs:

A broken heart: Risk of heart disease in boutique or grain-free diets and exotic ingredients
What is New with Taurine? • MSPCA-Angell
It’s Not Just Grain-Free: An Update on Diet-Associated Dilated Cardiomyopathy
UC Davis Investigates Link Between Dog Diets and Deadly Heart Disease

 

[stephanietx]

We feed a grain-free diet and have for the past 12 years. However, we also mix in our own cooked chicken food we make ourselves. My husband makes it and adds a little bit of taurine to make sure kitties get enough in their diet.

 

[denice]

I have thought for awhile now that grain free was more a marketing strategy. Many, not all but many have just substituted other fillers for the grains. There are a few foods that haven't done that but they tend to be expensive.

 

[PushPurrCatPaws]

There is certainly a lot to complain about with variety of ingredients that go into canned foods. I've joined in the complaints about them in other threads, so I won't do so here. I guess I have decided my more immeditate concern in regards to taurine in canned cat foods is that I cannot be sure how much taurine is in them in the first place, post-processing and with the variations of taurine in meats. And even with companies adding taurine, I wonder how the canned foods are stored in distribution centers and if might decrease food quality a bit (e.g. that possible higher temperatures in these big warehouses could leach more taurine out of the canned foods or degrade the food somehow?) -- Powdered taurine is one supplement I do like to give to my cat; she gets a sprinkle of it over her food during one of daily meals.

 

[white shadow]

.
Thank you for this quality post!

There's another huge danger that comes with taurine deficiency in cats....retinal degeneration leading to permanent loss of vision.

This is an insidious condition.....it happens 'right under your nose', undetectable until the cat's vision is so severely impaired that you will realize something's wrong - by which time the damage has been done.....and, it will be irreversible (unlike DCM from low taurine).

[a lesson in here as well for anyone whose cat 'goes off their food' or becomes inappetent.....it takes only a very short time without the necessary taurine for that degeneration to begin, so a good practice is to supplement with taurine in these circumstances]
.

 

[cheesycats]

I think with this issue (both dog and cat) if you stick with a biologically appropriate meat based diet for the dog and cat (high meat based kibble with added toppers of quality canned food or raw food, bone broths, chicken hearts, etc) you will have no issue.
Please remember there’s are nearly 100 million dogs in the US as pets. Only a few thousand have reported anything.
Also about 2 million dogs are put to sleep a year. So the “omg dogs are dying left and right blah blah” is a little exaggerated.
To me the dcm issue is just a money grab attempt from Mars, Colgate (Hill’s entire canned dog food line has been recalled due to vitamin d levels. I have read many many stories of people’s dogs dying from that, and I even know some dogs personally who became very ill on it. The funny thing is most of the vitamin d recalls were done last year, Hill’s waited to pull stuff off the shelf and that resulted in possible hundred to thousands of dead dogs. Sad), and Nestle.
You’ll also take note Purina has a whole line of dog foods that are FULL of legumes and legume proteins. So if that doesn’t say anything idk what will.

 

[Willowy]

I wish they'd figure out what's causing it. I've been rorating my dogs' food, a new brand every bag, just to try to avoid an issue. But one has bad allergies so there are only so many I can rotate between.

The cats get canned Friskies and so far Purina doesn't seem to have a lot of recalls or major issues so I don't worry as much about them

 

[Weasel21]

Several of you mention adding toppers to commercial kibble. My first thought would be that, if pulses/potatoes do make taurine less biologically available, they would still do so for the toppers when it is fed at the same time as the kibble. But perhaps (at some unknown threshold) the additional taurine could overcome some of the kibble's potential shortfalls and still be enough to meet the cat's needs.

Taurine supplements did not appear to help my cats, but I also struggled to find information on exactly how much to give them (unknowingly, I ended up giving them less than cats treated in the original taurine-DCM cat studies), and they were both in congestive heart failure upon diagnosis so they just may have been too far gone for taurine to help. Or their DCM could have been related to another cause like genetics, or could have even been an interactive or additive effect between diet and genetics. Or this could all end up being related to a different nutrient important to the heart that BEG diets effect.

white shadow, you mention that taurine-deficient DCM can be reversed, and in some cases that is true but not always. Only 58% of taurine-supplemented cats had a 1 year survival & DCM improvement in Pion et al 1992 (https://www.researchgate.net/profil...ementation/links/0fcfd509c50743b000000000.pdf). Similar to the current dog studies, some recover with diet changes and some do not. But yes, retinal degeneration is also something worth thinking about to prevent, because that is not at all reversible.

cheesycats, you are correct in that the number of dogs dying from DCM is much lower than the number euthanized each year. I'm sure the number pales in comparison with just the number that are euthanized in shelters for non-medical reasons. The number of pets that are euthanized in that scenario is something that is preventable in many cases by simply spaying & neutering pets. That's not necessarily an issue that any one person can tackle alone, but it is an issue that each individual can tackle for their animals that they are responsible for, and that collectively could be reduced by multiple individuals acting. Education is key to getting people to even think about the issue.

I think pet nutrition is similar and that education is key. You mention feeding a biologically appropriate diet. Not everyone knows what that means, and all manufacturer's of pet food are going to do their best to trick people into thinking that they specific formula is what's best for their pet. That's the nature of a for-profit industry. Which is also why the pet food industry needs more oversight, in the form of scientific studies regarding ingredients & nutrition, in the form of quality control practices (do we really know the nutritional content of foods or are we trusting that a for-profit business is doing the right thing and quality testing regularly?), and in the form of consumer power (e.g. reporting when you pet gets sick and it might be linked to food, and raising awareness when there is potential for something to make an animal sick, whether that's vitamin d levels or pea protein or salmonella contamination). If there are commonalities between pets with a certain health condition, it should be studied further, or there would never be resolution (contaminated foods would never be recalled and pets would continue to die needlessly). Yes, dogs and cats die every day, but if something is potentially preventable, should we not strive to investigate further and be conservative while the suspected cause is being investigated?

Foods are marketed as nutritionally complete, so why would consumers think that they would need to add toppers to kibble? Even as a biologist, I stupidly did not think about it because I trusted that the smaller companies offering natural/holistic ingredients would provide something that was nutritionally appropriate and not harmful to my pets. Even if someone supplements kibble with meat, how many actually know that cooking the meat destroys essential nutrients? It's worth sharing what we do know (e.g. taurine is important to pet health and deficiently can lead to dilated cardiomyopathy) and what is being investigated (e.g. certain diets have been correlated with heart problems) to at least get people thinking about what the real nutritional needs of their pets are, not just what the pet food industry says the nutritional needs are. To get people thinking about it, doing their own research, and coming to their own conclusions based on science.

 

[frkrhe]

I have been following this on a specific Facebook group for dogs. I have a dog that has symptoms of DCM. I have a vet appointment for him and have been researching different foods as we feed grain free right now. Will know more after our appointment.

So I was wondering if there was any more detailed information on cats and potential DCM. Does anyone have any knowledge or experience with it. I have seen in the nutrition section where some feed grain free and some do not. I made a change recently due to one of cats having food allergies. But I am having second thoughts on the change because the food I researched uses lots of legumes and the can version is started to result in watery stools and throwing up. I always knew taurine was important to cats. But did not how important it was to dogs.

 

[Jem]

I may not be adding anything to this thread, but all I know is that I am now not fully into the "grain free" movement. And for the simple reasons that most grain free foods are simply changing the grains sources with other non meat products. If my cat had a sensitivity to grains then by all means I would find a grain free food, but that is the only reason I would do it.
Thinking back, all of the cats I've had over the years, who ate "junk" cat food, all lived long healthy lives, and yet when we adopted our last cat, we had switched all of our cats to a "grain free", thinking it was better. That newest cat passed from CHF at the age of 10. Was it related to the food? IDK. But grain free obviously does not guarantee a long healthy life, just like a food with grains does not mean an early death or health issues.
I now just try to look at the ingredients and make sure that most of the protein comes from animal sources, and yes, by-products and meal are acceptable sources of animal protein. Picture a kitty eating a mouse. The muscle only is what is considered "meat". Ligaments, organs, skin, fat, blood vessels, nerves...are what is considered "by-products", so in a feline, what is so wrong about eating that? If a cat only ate the "meat' from the mouse, and not the whole thing, they would starve. And although "meal" is processed/rendered by-products, it is still from an animal, which IMO, is better than potatoes or peas. I just make sure that the "meal" is not too high up on the list, but if it's in there somewhere, I'm OK with it.
I may be wrong in my thinking, but I just try to decipher what is simply marketing and what is really important. The grain/gluten free stuff has swept across all food industries (animal and human) and most of it is just marketing and making things more expensive.