A Guide to Good Nutrition Throughout a Cat’s Life

That can be a tough one to answer. And it’s a rather broad list of questions. I think the safest bet is to look into various sites. I know for sure the ASPCA has a website that is fairly comprehensive when it comes to foods and even more specifically human foods that can be toxic or make your animals ill. So I would probably reference a list like that to find out for sure.

Yeah, it’s kind of a tough question, because what do we really mean when we say human food? There are certain things that we eat that cats most definitely eat; chicken and fish, things like that, absolutely. Do you want to depend just on those? Of course not.

It’s always safest and, in my opinion, best, to feed them a well-balanced cat-formulated diet. Does that mean commercial foods are best? We can debate that when we have more time. But I think it’s the simplest thing that provides, as I said, a well-balanced diet with all the vitamins and minerals that they need. So that’s what I tend to stick with for my own animals.

Let’s look at it this way. They eat every day. The most common thing we see is food allergies. If the allergy is consistent 365 days a year, then it’s probably not fleas and it’s probably not seasonal. I would approach illnesses that are related to food the same way.

If it’s something that you’re feeding—maybe it’s a new additive that you added to the cat’s diet or a new ingredient or perhaps even a new bag of food—and right at that point you see that your cat has been constantly ill with a variety of signs, it’s a strong possibility that it’s the food. If it began with the initiation of a new ingredient and it’s consistent after the cat has been eating the new food, that is kind of a big red flag for me.

Yes, typically very transient and mild harm, but yes. The most common thing we see is when a diet has changed abruptly is gastrointestinal signs. What does that look like? Some cats can vomit, but more often they’ll have diarrhea. So if you do have to make a change, or if you’re planning on making a change, just do it gradually over the course of maybe a week. Use this period to gradually mix the new food in slowly, giving more and more of the new food to make sure that they tolerate it.

There again, if the illness can be traced back to the addition of a new ingredient or food or something along those lines, that is when I would become suspicious. To answer one specific set of signs that can say, oh, that means your cat ate something bad, I can’t do that because it just depends on what they ate. Certain foods can be toxic to an animal’s gastrointestinal system. Some can be toxic to their heart and some can cause skin any issues. It just depends on what they ingest in order to be able to answer that.