how do you recommend food how do you research through the web

Question

I am writing to express my deep concern and disappointment regarding some of the food recommendations I followed based on your reviews.

I live in Latin America, and I have a 9-year-old cat who is my family. Since I no longer have my parents, she is my daughter, and I do everything I can to take care of her. She has food intolerances and last year suffered from bladder stones, which made her extremely ill. Because of this, I carefully researched online to find trustworthy information about suitable foods for her.

Initially, I chose GO! Sensitivities after reading your review, despite having some doubts. I trusted your evaluation and continued with that option until I confirmed it was not working for her. Trusting your recommendations again, I decided to try Brit, but the result was devastating. Within less than 24 hours, my cat vomited everything she ate three times and developed severe diarrhea. I was extremely worried.

I started reading other reviews online on various platforms, and I was shocked to see that many people reported similar issues with both GO and Brit. I don’t know the criteria you use to rate these foods, but for cats with complex health needs, recommending such products can be very risky and harmful.

You must reconsider how you evaluate the products you recommend, especially those intended for cats with special dietary needs. It is unacceptable to put animals’ health at risk this way. This experience has been heartbreaking for me, and I no longer feel I can trust your reviews.

Dr. Chris Vanderhoof, DVM, MPH · Answer

Hi Marian,

The diet reviews are made based on 6 factors, and you can see how a particular diet rates based on those at the top of each article review.

Any food review should be used only as a guide and can never provide any guarantee that a particular food will be palatable to an individual cat or that a digestive issue may not result.

Separate from medical concerns a cat may have, there are other factors that many consumers care deeply about, which includes factors like how much will this diet cost compared to others, where are the ingredients sourced from, are there many different options available for a rotational diet approach, and have there been any quality control issues leading to voluntary or mandatory recalls.

I would say for the most part, that these reviews are aimed at assisting folks with making decisions for those factors. Other reviews of a diet are also reviewed in their own right to see if there have been a lot of complaints or concerns from other consumers. But these types of reviews are going to include things like satisfaction for the price of the diet, consumers’ perception of how palatable a diet is and whether their cat likes it, etc. In general, these are going to be for cats who don’t have serious digestive disorders where a medical issue may be present.

If a cat has actual medical concerns, such as a history of bladder stones or a chronic gastrointestinal disorder as you mention, I think you may be disappointed in general with trying one over the counter diet after another. No over the counter diet, even one that professes to be limited ingredient or be appropriate for a sensitive stomach can ever profess to treat a medical condition. Only prescription diets can carry a label for doing that.

While there’s no way for me to know for certain, I would be concerned from your description that your cat could have an actual gastrointestinal medical condition, such as inflammatory bowel disease or chronic enteropathy.

Transitioning quickly to any new diet can always lead to digestive upset. Slow transitions help with that. I always advise transitioning to a new maintenance diet for a cat over 1-2 weeks. Perhaps that was a factor.

But the degree of reaction you described with the several vomiting episodes and profuse diarrhea in only one day is why I would be concerned for a medical disorder, especially if you have seen issues like this with other diets as well. IBD for example, is often related to one or more protein allergies. All of these diets have a variety of protein types (like chicken, fish, rabbit, etc.). This is good for many healthy cats to implement a rotational diet, which you could read more about here https://cats.com/rotation-diet-for-cats .

But for cats with true digestive disorders, protein elimination and identifying one or more offending dietary proteins is extremely important. Indiscriminately feeding a variety of proteins can cause problems if we don’t know which one or more a cat may be reacting to. That’s why prescription diets that we use for these types of disorders have either novel proteins (which essentially avoid chicken, beef, or fish) or hydrolyzed protein where the body can’t develop an immune reaction.

Even among prescription diets, you have to do diet trials for several weeks to see the response. Some cats will eat one and not another because they’re cats and can be picky about what they like.

As an example, a colleague of mine who had a cat with IBD found a prescription diet choice her cat liked. My own cat refused to eat it. A prescription diet that my own cat ended up really liking and doing well with for the same condition had previously caused diarrhea in my colleague’s cat. Each cat is an individual and will have individualized responses.

If a cat either rejects a particular diet or has digestive issues after starting it. I first consider if we’ve transitioned over a long enough period of time (1-2 weeks). If we’re seeing digestive issues (often mild like soft stool after a couple days) that diet may not be appropriate for that particular cat (but fine for others).

But I am concerned with the very quick and severe issue you saw in your cat along with the description that it sounds like you are seeing issues like this chronically with her. You can still see issues like this even with good quality over the counter diets if a medical condition is present that has not yet been fully evaluated. If you have not yet, you should discuss this issue further with your veterinarian. There are diagnostic options for evaluating for enteropathies or through prescription diet trials. If a prescription diet is needed for a digestive disorder, there are several that also provide protection against the formation of bladder stones as well.