Cat Chat Feline Forum

Hello
One of my cats was diagnosed with stage 1 kidney disease earlier this year after completing radioactive iodine treatment for hyperthyroidism. He is doing really well now and we moved all our cats onto Hills k/d food (as all the cats are elderly and the vet said it wouldn't harm them) which keeps feeding time simple (but expensive!).
But now, another cat has been diagnosed with diabetes (expensive year for vets bills too!) The vet recommended a low carb diet for her.
Are there any low carb and kidney disease friendly foods out there, or am I going to have to feed them separately? I'd appreciate your advise.

When our old Ragdoll was diagnosed with possible kidney problems (it cleared up fortunately as it was linked to teeth problems and when he had had them removed his kidneys recovered) one of our vets suggested a special diet. I looked into it at the time and the special foods mainly seemed to be lower in protein than normal cat foods rather than any other difference. I don't know that much about it but that seemed to be the message.

My mother on the other hand has an insulin dependent diabetic cat. The special diabetic foods are specifically high protein as a diabetic cat needs as much protein as possible. (They also started giving her daily dishes of cooked chicken to make sure she ate enough when she should). As she quickly refused the special food, the vet advised that kitten food was the best option as that had some of the highest protein levels available.

As you can see the two conditions seem to have opposite feeding requirements. The only thing I could suggest was to keep them both on the low protein food and give the diabetic one additional protein rich meals. Cats get very little benefit from carbohydrates, they actually have problems digesting a lot of them. I don't fully understand why low protein is better for kidney problems in cats hopefully someone else can help with that side of things. The only other suggestion would be personalised chip operated feeding bowls.

Blue, the Ragdoll, mainly ate Felix AGAIL and Purina One dried food, both of which are high in proteins, but after the one incident, never had kidney problems again.

I hope you can sort something out, trying to feed different foods to different cats is always a nightmare and the special diet foods seem so limited in choice that after a few days the cats refuse to eat it anyway.

Modern thinking seems to be that it's the quality of protein that's important for cats with renal issues, rather than just the amount. Tanya's website is tough going, but a mine of useful information, especially on foods:

http://www.felinecrf.org/