Good Food For Cat With Struvite Crystals?
Friday January 20, 2006
CRE8VE asks: "My sister's cat has struvite crystals. The vet recommended Hills and Waltham S/O foods. My sister's cat doesn't quite like the taste of these foods (he was on Wellness) and my sister doesn't like the fact that they use chicken by-product in their foods. Does anyone have any recommendations of brands and foods that she can give him?"
Comments
It’s weird that I should come across your question, as it is the very exact question I was searching for an answer to just now! My cat Olive was also eating Wellness before, and suffers from struvite crystals in his urine. Two different vets have prescribed the Waltham and the Hills Science Diet foods for him. Animal nutrition is my passion, and I hope to become a nutritionist one day.
I have spent the past 6 years researching about pet food and nutrition, and have picked up on several things. The first being never feed dry food. Cats with urinary tract issues must have moisture in their diets, and eating dry food keeps them from obtaining enough liquid (and no, they do not know to drink enough water to make up for it, and watering down dry food only causes the development of harmful bacteria that live dormant in spores on the dry food).
The second is my pet peeve about prescription diets. Although they work, the way they work (for urinary tract issues) is by removing the magnesium from the food in order to prevent crystals from forming. Crystals form in the urine only when it is alkaline, and the magnesium reacts with the alkalinity to create struvite crystals. But one thing people don’t understand is that magnesium is essential to a cat’s diet, or it will suffer other negative health side effects. What you need to do is lower the alkalinity of the diet rather than removing the magnesium. And another thing, you are right, prescription diets mostly contain nothing but grains, meat by-products and harmful preservatives. So, it’s no wonder most cats don’t even like them. Grains cause alkaline urine. So who on earth invented these UTI prescription diets anyway?! What I keep running into is the consistent recommendation to feed all cats a moist diet high in meat protein, low in carbs, and grain-free. Supposedly, this should solve ALL the health problems a cat would ever have… Good luck! We’re all going to need it.
Ok, so what should I feed my cat? I’m currently feeding him Royal Canin S/O. Thanks
I just today got my cat back from the hospital where they removed a urinary blockage. My comment is this If the veternarian says feed the animal one type of food why argue. Vets go to school for many years, and seem to treat their patients better than most people hospitals do. It was a sad event to deal with and I hope to not have to do it again. So if vet says do this why not do what they say?
What I’ve come across is that most vets are not experts in nutrition as well medicine….
Vets receive little, if any, nutritional education in vet school. Insteady what they get are ‘informercials’ from reps of the commercial pet food industry.
Cats are obligate carnivores and as such are designed to obtain all their nutritional needs from their prey. In the domesticated cat, prey is usually unavailable so we’ve come to rely on dry kibble loaded with grains and other crap. Grain has no place in a cat’s diet. They are unable to process it or derive any nutritional value from it.
If your cat was eatig Wellness and developed crystals, I’m stumped. There are some groups on Yahoo! dedicated to feline kidney disease. My suggestion would be to search out those groups and get suggestions from them as to a better food than Hills or Waltham.
Mine and a friends cat have developed struvites while on Wellness Core. I’m currently alternating Solid Gold dry and Wysong’s Feline Uretic while she’s using Wysong’s Archetype. I have not had a recurrence in a year.
It always astonishes me to see people saying “vets know nothing about food but I know a lot more by surfing the Web.” Frankly, I trust sources like the Cornell Feline Health Center over the second or third-hand information circulated on the Web from people I have never met and don’t know the backgrounds of. For instance, people like to repeat the “obligate carnivore” line because it makes them sound knowledgeable. Cornell also uses the phrase but does not say dry food is bad for cats. When I see people say that their cat probably died because it was fed a certain brand of food, I have to wonder how would you know? Are you a veterinary pathologist? Did you do an autopsy yourself? People don’t distinguish between correlation and causality.
Quite frankly, if my cat had a serious health problem, I would trust the foremost feline health research center in the country rather than relying on the hearsay and anecdotal information from self-educated “experts.”
My cat also developed large crystals while eating Wellness. He had surgery and now has been eating one of the prescription diets with no recurrence of crystals. The food is very irregular though and not consistent so I am looking for a better food that will not cause crystals to re-occur.
My cat became alergic to chicken after switching to Hills Diet. No more of that crap. Some vets are just cannot be trusted.
Hah! How on earth do you expect the vet know that your cat is allergic to chicken in the first place? Bet you didn’t even know it yourself.
Very strange that many of you mention struvite crystals and Wellness food. My coon cat is 5 years old and has just developed struvite crystals. She was also on Wellness Healthy Weight and Wellness Indoor cat. She has just started with Hill’s C/D. I’m hoping this will help her.