Home Cooked Or Raw Recipes For Ckd Cat With Allergies

[entlaufene]

I started a thread a little while ago about what to feed my kitty, but thought I'd make the question broader (and maybe get more response).

My cat is allergic to something, probably chicken, fish, and grains. (A couple years ago had an episode of not eating for a few weeks, had to syringe feed and put her on steroids temporarily.) She also has mild CRF (elevated creatinine and urea, normal phosphorous and other minerals, I think IRIS stage 2). I know for CRF cats the big thing is low phosphorous. But I don't know how to put together a balanced recipe for her.

Complicating everything is I just moved to Uruguay, and the pet food industry here is... lacking. The only wet food I've seen is Hill's, everything else is dry. I recently ran out of the food I brought with me, for the past week I've been feeding cooked ground beef (5% fat) with eggshell and butter. And she actually eats it, yayyyyy.

What I want to figure out is a minimal recipe to feed her. The supplement industry is also pretty limited, so a lot of the recipes I've seen are simply impossible. My plan is to start with cooked, and eventually switch her to raw (she hates food changes and I also need time to get all the necessary equipment, like a grinder...). I was planning on doing all beef (or maybe pork), this country is pretty into beef (and it's grass fed by default!) so it's easy to find.

Questions:
1) What cuts do people usually feed? Are there any differences in phosphorous between different cuts? (And since the beef is grass fed, all the cuts are on the lean side.)
2) What fats can I add to balance out the beef fat? She doesn't really like eating the hardened chunks of fat that result from cooking and refrigerating, if I could add a more fluid oil I think she'd like it better (and maybe there's issues with the omega-3/6 balance?). Her old food had safflower oil, so maybe that's an option. And the fish allergy makes omega-3 supplementation complicated (hoping the grass fed beef has a good balance). Anyone have a reference with a breakdown of oils and what their fatty acid contents are? (Right now I'm adding a tiny bit of butter so it softens at room temperature, she really likes it.) Or a good reference on exactly which fatty acids cats need and their quantities?
3) Are beef organs ok to feed? I found a website with a recipe for a CKD diet, that said beef organs are not recommended, better to use chicken, but didn't say why. Also, beef organs are GIGANTIC and I only have a tiny dorm sized fridge with a shoebox freezer, would it be fine if I just switched organs every couple months or so?
4) Is taurine supplementation really necessary for raw feeding? My understanding was that the intense cooking process somehow made the taurine less bioavailable, so wouldn't raw meat be fine without? Also, anyone know of any studies about taurine that don't use industrially processed food? (Any difference in taurine availability in pressure canned vs lightly simmered food, for example?) With the cooked food, how long can I go without supplementing the taurine?
5) Eggshells: any difference between brown and white shells? Anyone have a breakdown of the nutritional contents of quail eggs? Are eggshells (or eggs) likely to set off a chicken allergy?
6) How long does it take to see problems from an unbalanced diet? How long does it take for phosphorous to get out of whack in a CKD cat that's eating too much phosphorous? (My hand ground eggshells aren't very powdered, so volume measurements aren't accurate and I'm just eyeballing it.)
7) She's a suuuuuuper picky eater and I want to add any supplements one at a time. What supplements should have priority? (What supplements should I get ASAP and no matter what, even if I have to have someone smuggle them into the country inside a teddy bear?)

This whole moving process is so much more stress than I thought it'd be. (I talked to a vet about food options, she only had dry food to recommend, was stunned at my cat's age, and was totally stumped when I asked about phosphate binders. I have a feeling cats die younger here and people don't bother with cats with chronic illness.)

 

[entlaufene]

Oh and the other problem with adding supplements is, as mentioned before, my fridge is super tiny. Recipes I've seen have a really small amount of supplement per massive quantity of meat (much more than will fit in my freezer). And since splitting pills really isn't that reliable, I'd like to avoid it.

 

[Ardina]

I can maybe answer a few of your questions, but I'll leave the rest to people who know more than I do.

2) Do you think she'd eat chicken skin? You could even feed that separately, if necessary. Or you could grind it in with the rest. There is a way to feed fish oil without triggering a fish allergy. @valentine319 did a lot of research on this.

3) Maybe freeze dried organs would work better for you? I have no idea about beef vs chicken organs for CKD.

4) Taurine supplementation is still necessary. The grinding process can degrade it, and it tends to leach into water, so definitely supplement. Don't drain any water that comes with the meat/that comes off when you grind.

 

[entlaufene]

If I could find freeze dried organs, I'd try them. I've only been here about a month, so maybe they're somewhere I haven't looked yet.

I'm really nervous about trying anything that she was eating when she had the intestinal badness flare up. I think it was what I thought was a single protein food deciding to change their recipe and add fish oil, so maybe it's just fish. But she's always had flaky skin and minor signs of an allergy, so it could also have been a fowl allergy just then deciding to get nasty. (She's eaten food with fish and chicken as the main protein most of her life. Higher quality brands that at least claimed human grade meat, but still the same proteins.) So chicken skin and fish oil are out for now.

Still looking for taurine here. (It's good for humans, too!) I've seen some gyms with stacks of bodybuilding supplements in their windows, but I'm somehow intimidated by gyms and the people that sell bodybuilding stuff. For some strange reason. I'll put braving a gym on my new year's list.

 

[entlaufene]

I found iodized low sodium salt today! Anyone know how much I'd need to add to a pound of ground beef (or how much per 100 g meat)?

It's not Morton's, per gram it has: sodium 131 mg, potassium 346 mg, iodine 33 mcg.
Ingredients: potassium chloride (66%), sodium chloride (33%), potassium iodide, anticlumping agents: magnesium carbonate (INS504i) and/or silica dioxide (INS 551) and potassium ferrocyanate (INS536).

Right now my recipe is ground beef (at the butcher it says "less than 20% fat", don't know exact percent) with eggshell to get a 1.5:1 Ca ratio (assuming the phosphorous content of 15% fat ground beef from the USDA database) plus water and a splash of olive oil to soften the beef fat chunks. I thought I read somewhere that the Ca ratio should be even higher for CKD cats, but I can't find that source again, so if anyone has different info on that please tell me. The scale I have is pretty crummy so anything that's measured on a small gram amount is not very accurate, so it's sort of estimated at this point still anyway.

Going to try boiling some eggs and giving her some yolk plain to see if she hates it or not to get her some of the fat soluble vitamins. Still haven't found any beef heart or liver. In about a month I should be moving to a place with a real freezer, so I think I'll wait to do the organs until then. Hopefully she won't get a deficiency in the mean time. Today she was really playful and running around the apartment and attacking things, so she seems to be feeling fine so far! I might need to add some fiber source, though, she had a pretty big poopvomit (vomit right next to the litterbox while/after pooping) and her poop's smaller and drier than normal on this meat only diet. But I did spoil her and let her go crazy on the cat grass and the vomit was mostly that.

 

[entlaufene]

Iodine is so much more confusing than I thought!! I can't find an amount of iodine in Morton's lite salt, only a DRV%. Which is almost double the % listed on my salt's label, but I don't know if Argentina's health department has a different daily recommendation for iodine than the FDA.

According to Low Iodine Diet For Your Hyperthyroid Cat

Hill’s research seemed to show that a diet that had an iodine level at or below 0.32 ppm on a dry matter basis returned the blood total thyroxine of cats to normal range within 8-12 wks. Experimental, non-hyperthyroid cats, fed a diet as low as 0.17pp of iodine for a year seemed to do well.

To apply this I'd need to get an estimated dry matter content of the beef. So according to Beef, ground, 85% lean meat / 15% fat, raw [hamburger] Nutrition Facts & Calories it's 65.7% water. 1 ppm = 1mcg/g, so if I use the above as a bare minimum of iodine, I'd need 0.06 to 0.11 mcg iodine per gram beef, so 0.00177 to 0.00333 g of my lite salt per gram beef.

But according to Debunking the Myth of "Iodized" Salt

The average gram of iodized salt is thought to contain
0.075 mcg. But that measurement is taken at the factory. By the time
the salt reaches the grocery store half of the iodine in the sealed
container has “vaporized,” or as scientists would say, the salt
“sublimed” into the air. Once you get the salt container to your kitchen
and open it, whoosh, more iodine escapes. The longer you keep it, the
less iodine remains. Iodine in salt is unstable. Dasgupta et al. report it
takes between 20 and 40 days for an opened container of iodized salt
to lose half of its iodine.

So the amount on the label might not even be accurate???!

Any advice would be appreciated! My cat's thyroid is still normal, but it's high normal two tests in a row and the vet said we need to watch her for hyperthyroid, so I definitely don't want to overdo the iodine.