Cat Health Problems - Seven Easy Steps to Banish Them

Health is directly related to nutrition. This is true for you and every animal under the sun. That old saying of garbage in, garbage out is so very true, that few people doubt it.

Lets have a look at a few reasons why cat health problems seem to abound:

1. in the wild, cats live on freshly killed, raw prey, whereas in domesticity, cats who are fed commercial pet food have a diet of cooked food, often for long periods at high temperatures and pressures
2. in the wild, cat‘s prey will be mostly quality muscle meat, little fat, a small amount of organ meat, little or no carbohydrates (stomach contents) and lots of bones to crunch up, whereas cats who are fed commercial pet food have a low quality meat meal or meat by-products, high fat content (its cheap), high levels of carbohydrates (to bulk it out) and no bones to crunch on
3. a wild cats diet is always freshly killed, whereas a commercial brand of cat food is full of toxic preservatives, too toxic to be allowed into human food
4. a wild cat’s diet is naturally high in nutritious content, whereas a commercial pet food has synthetic and isolated nutrients, of questionable absorbability, added
5. a wild cat’s diet is pure, natural, organic, whereas many brands of pet food contain ‘meat’ from euthanased animals, including the chemical used to kill, and laboratory animals, including the tested drug which may have killed the animal
6. in the wild a cat will only eat if the hunt was successful, which means they often go hungry, whereas a domestic cat often has food left out all the time. This can be the cause of digestive problems later in life, as it is not in keeping with how they evolved
7. cat health problems are few and far between in the wild - we can see this as wild cats are highly successful at colonising a new area

I believe there are other reasons for cat health problems, but by far the major contributor is the diet. The food a cat eats every day means the potential for the toxins to build up gradually, giving the appearance that the diet is not to blame.

Most of us, cats included, can manage not to succumb to disease or health problems, even if we have an inadequate diet for a short time. If however, it continues, then chronic deficiencies start to appear.

It is a sad testament to our times that money talks. Many of the larger commercial brands of pet food now have a significant influence in most of the veterinary schools. So vets are taught that commercial brands of pet foods are the most healthy. Which explains why almost all veterinary clinics are now loaded with the top commercial brands of pet food.

I never ask people to believe me. I simply put what I consider to be valid arguments and leave you, fair reader, to make up your own mind.

Could your cat health problems be a result of the diet she is fed?

What feelings and thoughts do you have on this? Perhaps you need to do a little research yourself? Thorough and unbiased research will always lead you to the truth.

Once I opened up my mind to consider everything in my quest for the cause of cat health problems, the answers came flooding in. I was the barrier, with my pre-conceived ideas.

What are Your Leading Cat Health Questions?

Cats don’t seem to be as healthy as I remember them to be when I was a child, many moons ago.

Now they seem to be prone to any and every disease under the sun, with exotic breeds succumbing the most.

Whether your cat health questions are infertility, upper respiratory issues, “inevitable” ageing diseases, renal problems, fleas, dead babies, or anything else it all comes down to the fact that domestic cats don’t have the healthy immune systems they once did.

You think you’re doing all the right things by taking her to the vet regularly and doing as they suggest, whether it’s vaccinating or feeding the cat food they supply.

But still your cat’s health is failing.

Why is this so?

I think there are several reasons for this, but there is one outstanding reason which you can address without much knowledge.

And that’s diet.

Food is consumed daily. Which makes it the number one area of importance.

If you are feeding your cat a commercial brand of cat food, her health will be deteriorating.

Why?

Cats evolved over many tens of thousands of years on a diet of fresh kills, which means fresh, raw meat. Their domesticity is comparatively recent, and commercial pet food only came into being about the middle of the 20th century.

So, think of your most pressing cat health questions and then look at the food you are feeding her? Is the food in accordance with how wild cats eat? If not, then maybe you need to think about a change.

I never expect people to believe me any more than I expect them to believe anyone. But I always try to put forward logical and reasonable arguments to support my way of thinking.

In the 1930’s Dr Pottenger carried out some experiments on cats. He discovered that the offspring of cats who were only fed cooked food were born with immune deficiencies.

He also discovered that within three generations, the immune system would be virtually useless unless some raw food had been eaten.

I suggest to you that no matter what your cat health questions are, the answer is always the same.

Raw meat and bones, just as wild cats eat.

Wild cats are very healthy (they have to be to survive), have few fleas and worms and don’t suffer the chronic, degenerative diseases that so afflict our domestic cats.

However, there is an enormous industry at the heart of cat health. Veterinarians and drug companies make enormous sums of money treating ailing cats. Many would go out of business if you decided to answer your own cat health questions by solid research.

But I’m encouraging you to do just that.

Cat Health Made Easy

It’s probably true to say that most people who enjoy the company of cats in their home are particularly conscious of providing good cat health care.

Optimising good cat heath care will not only provide your cat with the potential of a long life, but also of a healthy, carefree one, too. It’s very satisfying to see your cat happy, healthy and enjoying life.

What is the single most important thing you can do to ensure the your cat enjoys the best health?

Is it immunising your cat against all the common or known feline diseases?

Is it keeping your cat indoors, away from potential hazards such as fighting or car accidents?

Is it having them sterilised?

Perhaps it’s in keeping their sexuality entire?

Could it be ensuring their teeth are clean?

What about providing a loving, secure and safe home?

There are probably as many opinions about what’s important in cat health care as there are people!

Important though some of the above are, I don’t think any of them are as important to optimise good cat health as something that they do every day.

Eating!

Diet and nutrition are of top priority in maintaining the health of your cat. To my mind, this is the single most important aspect in maintaining anyone’s health., not just for your cat

You may be feeding your cat a top cat food, recommended by your veterinarian. You may feel that, with all the advertising, proprietary brands are the best cat food. But are they?

We all know that advertising makes hollow promises, as the advertiser is more concerned with making money than giving you the facts.

But surely you can trust your veterinarian. Can’t you?

Did you know that the top pet food manufacturers financially contribute to veterinary colleges? I may be old fashioned, but to me that means the colleges aren’t completely impartial. After all, you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

I suspect, that since you have reached this article, you’re searching for another way to improve your cats’ health, other than that recommended by your veterinarian - which is invariably everyone’s first choice.

Contrary to popular belief, and to most vets who sell processed food, it is the processed food itself which wreaks such havoc with cat health. Cats evolved by hunting animals and consuming most of it immediately.

Their digestive system has evolved to cope with this. Cooked, processed, preservatives and the very low grade meat by-products which are the basis for the majority of proprietary cat food on the market, is the single, most damaging factor in the deteriorating health of your cat.

If your cat gets all his nutrition from raw food, you will see a remarkable transformation in a matter of days.

But you need to get the balance right. You need to get the quantity and variety right for a good, all round balanced diet. Otherwise you could run the very real risk of one or more deficiencies. A serious deficiency can be fatal.

And you need to know about the de-toxing effect a change to a good diet entails.

When I first started introducing raw food to my cats, it was fraught with difficulties. I made mistake after mistake. After studying and applying various other therapists ways, I finally worked out what worked and what didn’t. What they said was right and what just couldn’t work.

So I wrote a book about cat health, based on my own experiences. I wish I’d had it before I embarked on that particular adventure. It would have saved me so much anxt.

When you address this so very important aspect of cat health, the spin off is enormous - professional therapist fees are cut back drastically.

Is there anyone alive who doesn’t love a win-win situation?

Diabetic Cat Food - How You Can Reduce the Need for Insulin

It is now generally accepted that human diabetes is an immune disorder. There seems no reason to suppose that feline diabetes is any different. This particular immune disorder has the form of failure of the pancreas to produce insulin.

An immune system brakes down because of the burden put upon it, mostly a chemical burden. When you consider all the chemicals most pets are subject to, there is little wonder their immune systems go on strike. Drugs, vaccinations, pesticides in the garden, harsh cleaners in the house, but perhaps worse of all by virtue of it’s frequent ingestion, are the preservatives in their daily diet.

A typical cat food is processed and comes in a box, packet or can. The dried cat food must contain high levels of preservative to keep it at room temperature, indefinitely, despite what the packet may say. Believe me, there’s no other way to have such a long shelf life.

Cats are particularly sensitive to chemicals, so readily succumb to them. A stay in a cattery may well overload them, as most catteries fastidiously clean their pens with strong disinfectants or bleach, to ensure there’s no cross contamination.

There are several things you can do immediately, to help your cat overcome this serious disease, even if they have had it a while. You never know how much good you can do until you try.

1. The first thing that’s really important to address is their diet. Start giving your cat a good quality, raw, diabetic cat food. Human grade raw meat, from a butcher, will generally not contain any preservatives or colour as most countries have laws against that.
2. It’s better to feed a diabetic cat 3 or 4 small meals a day, rather than 1 or 2 larger meals.
3. Diabetic cat food differs slightly from a normal healthy cat food by the fat content. The food must be low fat (but not no fat), as the pancreas is responsible for the production of enzymes which help break down fat.
4. No healthy cat food should contain any sugar, in particular diabetic cat food. Many, perhaps most, commercial cat food manufacturers use sugar as a filler. It bulks out the meat and is cheap, with a world glut.
5. No cat food should not contain large amounts of carbohydrates, which are a manistay part of almost all processed cat foods, including those for diabetic cats.
6. The mineral chromium assists the body in utilising the insulin more efficiently, so the addition of half to one teaspoon of brewers yeast to the diabetic cat food will help your cat. Chromium is also in liver, beef and spirulina.
7. Including vitamin E in the diabetic cat food reduces the amount of insulin required. Vitamin E occurs naturally in raw meat fat and spirulina. Vitamin E is also in eggs and wheat germ oil, but diabetic cat food should be low in oil and fat, so while these are recommended, they should be in small quantities. You can also supplement it in the d alpha tocopheral (the natural form). Try to avoid the synthetic form, which is more commonly used. Synthetic vitamins are not as well utilised by the cat. Dose 30 IU per day until you see improvement.
8. And play with your cat, so she gets some exercise. Exercise tends to decrease the need for insulin.

A good diabetic cat food, like any good cat food, is as close to that of a wild cats food as possible. Cats have evolved to efficiently use raw food. They can’t use processed and cooked food in the same way, as they lack the nutrients destroyed by cooking.

Once you have your cat regularly eating good quality raw food, she may need less insulin. And if it isn’t too far advanced, there’s no reason why she shouldn’t recover completely. Recovery from serious disease is not uncommon when the cause is addressed. Ensuring your cat only eats a healthy, high quality, raw, diet, at the very least will reduce her need for insulin.

Should You Feed Organic Cat Food for Best Feline Health?

The health of domestic cats is on the decline. Their life span is much below that of their wild cousins and the cats of your parents era. I frequently hear people implying their cat is old by the time they have reached eight or nine years of age.

Not that long ago, it was common for cats to reach 18 or 19 years of age, with a few rare exceptions reaching nearly 30.

You may have your own reasons why this might be happening, and I’m probably going to voice most of them here!

By virtue of the regularity of eating, I consider the most important reason why cats aren’t as healthy as they once were is the diet they are fed.

As people are coming into this awareness, there is a mad scramble by the commercial cat food industry to attract you with pretty words and smiling actors on the labels. The pretty words include icons such as ‘scientifically proven’ or ‘recommended by top vets’, although that is now less alluring than ‘natural’ or ‘all natural’. (I’m not sure what a ‘top vet’ is either. Could it be one who does the most advertising for the industry?)

However, ‘nature’, ‘natural’ and ‘all natural’ are slipping into second place as ‘organic’ becomes the favourite word of the day.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a strong contender for organic food, both for humans and for cats, but not all organic cat food really is organic.

For a start, the word ‘organic’ means nothing if it is not backed by a reputable certification. Everything that grows could be said to be organic. Many conventional producers have marked their produce as organic, when it had no certification.

Becoming a certified organic producer takes time - years. The soil is regularly checked. In that period, the producer can’t sell his produce as organic or use chemicals. It can be a tough time.

I have seen some dried organic cat food for sale. It was certified. But what’s the point in that? You’re feeding your cat organic cat food to avoid the chemicals that go into food production - the antibiotics in standard stock feed, the hormones given to stock to increase weight and production over a shorter period, the pesticides, herbicides, insecticides that are regularly used on the crops, the chemical fertilisers.

Stop and consider this. Can meat (in reality meat by-products as the good stuff goes for the higher priced human food) be kept indefinitely without the use of strong preservatives? How else can a packet of dried organic cat food have such a long shelf life?

Sure, the packet may not list preservatives in the list of ingredients. Why would they? You wouldn’t buy it.

The packet may even boast ‘no added preservative’. The wording needs to be clever to avoid litigation. ‘No added preservatives’ means they, the brand, didn’t add the preservatives. It doesn’t mean that preservatives weren’t added to the ‘meat’ before delivery.

So the million dollar question is, should you buy organic cat food? In my opinion, if it’s a commercial organic cat food, it is no better than non organic cat food.

All commercial cat food, whether organic or not, have one or more of the following preservatives in:

• ethoxyquin (which causes diarrhoea, vision disorders, blindness, organ failure, cancers, leukaemia on just exposure to the human factory workers)
• formalin is used to preserve dead bodies
• sodium nitrite, which gives a nice rosy colour to food and can produce powerful carcinogenic substances known as nitrosamines
• propyl gallate - is now suspected of causing liver damage
• propylene glycol used to maintain the right texture and moisture content is used as coolant antifreeze in engines
• up to 1000 times more salt than occurs naturally

Most of these are not allowed in human food, due to their high levels of toxicity. Do you think that could be why cats are not living as long as they once were Would you?

Can Healthy Cat Food Contain Preservatives?

In this day and age of the mighty dollar masquerading as king, it becomes more and more difficult to trust businesses who have a vested interest in gaining your sale. As cats can’t talk to us, or perhaps I should say, as we can’t hear what cats are telling us, we don’t have that all important input to know if we are providing our cats with a healthy cat food.

If you do a quick search on the internet, you’ll come across practically all pet food manufacturers proclaiming their brand is ‘all natural’, ‘healthy’, ‘holistic’, even ‘organic’, but in every single case they are selling dry food.

Just think about it for a minute. Dried food which contains any form of meat just won’t keep at room temperature. Try keeping your steak out of the refrigerator for a few days and see what happens.

So how do pet food manufacturers keep cat food indefinitely at room temperature?

The only possible way to do this is to add preservatives. Despite many claims saying there are no preservatives, logic tells you there has to be.

Cooking in itself may preserve meat a little longer than raw meat, but not for weeks, or even years.

So what, you may be thinking, I know there are preservatives in some of the foods I eat and I seem to be OK. Surely a few preservatives doesn’t mean I’m not feeding my cat a healthy cat food?

I personally don’t think any preservative is OK. It may appear to be harmless in the short term, but in the long term there will be consequences.

But apart from my personal opinion, there are some laws, perhaps rather basic or not well enforced, in almost every country around the world, that protects human food. So all preservatives used in human food has to be considered ‘reasonably safe’ by some standards.

Unfortunately, there are no such safe guards in pet food. Or the laws are even less effectively enforced than the human laws.

So the preservatives used in cat food can be the most toxic. Does cat food containing highly toxic preservatives sound like a healthy cat food to you?

Ever heard of formalin? Embalmers use it to preserve dead bodies.

Formalin, also known as formaldehyde, is widely used in pet food to preserve it.

You probably haven’t heard of ethoxyquin. That’s a preservative used in the rubber industry. It’s in the tyres of your car. So what on earth is it doing in your cat food?

Lets look at ethoxyquin’s history. When factory workers were exposed to it, they exhibited side effects similar to those of agent orange:

• constant diarrhoea
• vision disorders including blindness
• organ failure
• organ cancers
• leukaemia

Are you getting a bit concerned? Perhaps your cat is suffering from some kind of organ damage? Here are a few other common preservatives used in cat food to keep it at room temperature indefinitely;

• sodium nitrite, which gives a nice rosy colour to food and can produce powerful carcinogenic substances known as nitrosamines
• propyl gallate - is now suspected of causing liver damage
• propylene glycol used to maintain the right texture and moisture content is used as coolant antifreeze in engines
• up to 1000 times more salt than occurs naturally

No manufacturer can keep preservatives out of dry cat food if it has a long shelf life.

So, if you don’t feed your cat a commercial cat food, what can you feed her?

To my way of thinking, the only sure way of knowing you are providing a healthy cat food is to prepare it yourself.

Before you throw your hands up in horror, saying you don’t know how, you don’t have time, that’s where I come in.

I’ve done the research for a balanced, healthy cat food.

I’ve made all the mistakes and can show how not to fall into the traps I did.

By feeding your cat a healthy cat food, you’ll have fewer trips to your veterinarian and your cat will live longer.

Holistic Cat Food For the Healthiest Cat

Once you’ve started looking around for holistic treatment for your cat, it’s a natural sequel to think about holistic cat food.

There’s a saying that currently people have never been so well fed, but so under nourished. As this is a direct result of poor farming methods as well as bad dietary advice, it’s no less true for your cat as it is for you.

Changing over the diet of your cat to a more natural one, will not only benefit him, but your pocket too. Because your cat is healthier on this diet, you’ll have fewer visits to your preferred cat health professional.

But what exactly am I talking about?

Well, an holistic cat food is one which so closely resembles a wild cat’s diet, as to be in the same league as far as health is concerned.

You’ll probably be relieved to know, I’m not suggesting you go out and catch mice. What I’m asking you to do is to consider the diet of a wild cat and then be mindful in duplicating it as closely as you can, within the framework of readily available food and the constraints on your time.

Actually, I’ve already done that for you, so you don’t have to do all the hard work. I just want you to know the reasons behind feeding your cat an holistic diet to ensure better health and longevity.

It’s worth remembering that cats have evolved on a wild diet over millions of years, and are extremely healthy on it. Otherwise they would have died out.

So trying to duplicate nature’s bounty for your cat is the best way to ensure his good health and longevity.

Providing an holistic cat food isn’t difficult once you’ve opened up your mind to the idea of it. Isn’t that always the biggest hurdle? Once you’re open to the idea the rest, as they say, is easy. With a bit of guidance from someone who has made all the mistakes possible.

A quality, balanced holistic cat food:

• will provide your cat with all his nutritional requirements.
• will make your cat content and much less interested in hunting - hunting domestic cats usually means they are lacking nutrients in their current diet and they’re trying to redress that
• is free from chemical residue, such as preservatives and colour, which cats are so sensitive to
• contains no synthetic vitamins or minerals - which are difficult to absorb and utilise so tend to be excreted
• is raw and so contain all the enzymes and other nutrients lost in cooking

Holistic cat food contains only naturally occurring vitamins and minerals, in a balanced and whole food form. You know, you shouldn’t need to supplement your cat’s food. All the necessary nutrients should come from the food, and in the wild, they do.

But, because modern farming methods cut corners in quality to boost quantity (and so profit), the resulting foods are often poor in nutrients. So supplementing becomes necessary.

Most supplements on the market today are isolated nutrients. In nature, nutrients are always found with other nutrients that they co-depend on. For example, calcium, phosphorus and magnesium must be in the natural balanced ratio and need vitamin A and D to be properly utilised. Iron, copper and cobalt co-depend on each other. And so on.

In addition to the isolation, most modern supplements are synthetic. Synthetic nutrients aren’t easily absorbed or utilised by the body. And you can overdose on synthetic nutrients more easily than on natural ones, which the body knows how to deal with.

Holistic cat food, on the other hand, is easily absorbed and utilised by your cat. The supplements are a whole food, and are nutrient dense. This means all that is needed is readily absorbed.

It is not time consuming to provide this diet, if you follow my easy feline dietary advice, It’s simply a question of being aware of certain pitfalls. It may take you and your cat a while to work things out, but it’s well worth it for the huge benefits which follow.