feline diabetes: a new cat diet switching adventure

[cimorene]

Healthy cat blood glucose would be around 5-10, diabetic cat blood glucose aims for 10-15, and diabetic cat blood glucose should be kept under 17, the vet has told us.

When Snookums got his diagnosis two weeks ago he tested at 23, and this Friday (after 4½ days of insulin doses but only mild dietary changes) it was down to 20.5.

However, I read elsewhere that it's possible for a diabetic cat going on insulin for the first time to go weeks before any real behavioral indications that they're feeling better appear. I would say he's been slightly more energetic as measured in # of times he feels playful and # of times he wakes me up at night, but no big shifts.

We have been instructed in how to do home blood glucose tests so the next steps are to

1. buy the tester and testing strips,


2. start testing a few times to get a basic idea, and then


3. remove as much starch from his diet as possible (removing dry food and wet food containing 10% or higher energy from carbohydrates entirely from the cats' diets).

I've already been testing a variety of new wet foods alongside their kibble... while using up the wet food we already had and recording which ones they eat. They are weirdly amenable to the basic Sheba pate foods (provided they are warmed to room temperature first and then thoroughly mashed up in the bottom of the bowl with a bit of liquid to thin them; if you just turn the tin upside-down and present a sort of gelatinous lump of pureed food the BB doesn't recognize it as food at all), which are your basic grocery store cat food made with animal byproducts, and oddly have rejected two flavors of expensive stuff like "pheasant and duck" and "chicken liver with game" from the pet store made with much higher grades of meat.

I'm hoping the BB's increased openness to pate-like foods might mean I will be able to feed them wholly or partially frozen raw food eventually, which has even less carbs (typically none) and is hence better for them and is fairly widely available in Finland.

Comments

[tripleransom]

Hm. fortunately we were able to keep Kitty Boy, the most recent diabetic cat regulated with diet alone. His was a pretty mild case, anyway. Can you get specialty diabetic diet food in Finland? They didn't have anything like that 30 years ago when we had the first diabetic cat, Biggie, so it was 2x daily insulin shots for him. But as I said, he made it for 8 years or so, well into his upper teens, so despite the fact that it was a lot of trouble, I guess we did it right. Raw food was simply not available back then and still hard to get here.

How do you do the tests? All we had was Ketostix, which measure urine glucose. Catch is, that doesn't typically show up until there's quite a lag time. I finally got him to use the litter box on command, which made life easier, but still there was a limit. I know blood tests are much more accurate, but they didn't have any way to do that at home back then.

[cimorene]

There is special diabetic food, but one of the first things my searching for info for diabetic cat owners showed me was that it isn't particularly good. I mean, it's probably better than some dry food, but in general, it has more carbohydrates than other foods one can buy instead that are not labeled for diabetic cats, and hence is worse for the cat. The best results can be achieved by specifically looking for wet foods only and looking for minimal non-meat ingredients with a minimal % energy from carbs (<10%) and as close to 50% from protein as possible (with energy from fats ideally below energies from protein). That is more work of course if you have to do it every time, but in my case, it's looking for the best options of the food that's available around here.

The standard tests are quick blood tests using a home blood glucose meter of the kind human diabetics use more or less. At least, 8 years ago when Wax's late cat, the Crazy, was diabetic everyone was using the human kind; they now have ones that are slightly differently calibrated for use on animal blood, but you can still use a human one instead apparently. I guess the animal ones are expensiver.

[tripleransom]

Hm - interesting. Things have come a long way. I hope I never have another diabetic cat, (2 were enough!) but if so, I'm glad to see that it will be easier to deal with.

I'm sorry you're going through this, but at least it's do-able. Keep us posted.