Mini came to us as a kitten around 2012. Back in those days I fed raw meaty bones and the only food available with bone sizes appropriate for a cat easily available in the UK was chicken wings. During bone growth I wanted to ensure adequate calcium and phosphate and nutritional grade bone meal had gone from routine use to virtually unavailable. I'd not, at that time, delved deep in to the problems of PUFA which are plentiful in the chicken wings.
Over the years she had low grade on-going gingivitis problems, with hindsight probably related to the high linoleic acid content of her diet. As I came to realise that the omega 6 PUFA are a problem I transitioned most of our other cats to 12% fat beef mince and that's what they all eat nowadays.
Not Mini. She routinely threw up on beef mince but was fine on the chicken wings, so there she stayed.
Then she broke two teeth (on a chicken wing!) and when I did her dentistry it was obvious that her low grade gingivitis was not low grade and that all of her teeth were in a bad way, so I took them all out.
No cat is going to eat raw chicken wings with her gums. I tried her on beef mince again, she threw up again. Eventually I decided to try her on chicken breast meat, well cut up and relatively low in fat so low in PUFA. She liked it, maintained weight and had no suggestion of ammonia toxicity from an almost all protein diet. She's a cat after all.
Then last November she hid up under one of the children's beds and when I managed to get her out she was very distressed and had laboured breathing. A quick trip to the practice and 30 seconds of ultrasound by someone better at it than me confirmed heart failure.
Heart failure in cats is common. It's usually hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and is essentially untreatable. I assumed that if HCM was present then high protein + high glucose (cats really do convert protein to glucose continuously) -> high GH -> IGF-1 -> cardiac hypertrophy. Probably wrong but who knows? My colleague of the ultrasound machine was uncertain if she could see hypertrophic or dilated cardiomyopathy so I booked a scan with a cardiologist. A few frusemide tablets stopped her drowning and she had no suggestion of a thrombus or pre-thrombus in either atrium.
It was dilated cardiomyopathy. Or end stage hypertrophic cardiomyopathy where replacement of cardiac myocytes with fibrous tissue looks, on ultrasound, just like the dilated form.
DCM is genetic or caused by taurine deficiency. So I PubMed-ed:
and found this:
Poultry breast meat is special when compared to poultry leg/wing meat. It has the lowest taurine content of any meat. If you feed your cat on chicken fillets she will develop dilated cardiomyopathy. If the cardiomyopathy allows the generation of an atrial thrombus which breaks off the syndrome produced (iliac thrombosis) is terminal, whatever hope your vet might cautiously suggest re "treatment".
On the plus side DCM from taurine deficiency is completely reversible. Mini was re-scanned recently by the same cardiologist and now has a normal heart. She has been off of frusemide for months.
Taurine comes by the kilo as a sports supplement. I put a pinch of it on her food each night.
Due to my initial thoughts before getting the diagnosis I'd changed her on to beef mince yet again and was going to put up with paddling in cat vomit on the kitchen floor occasionally. Didn't happen. No more vomiting on beef. Huh?
So now all of our cats are on beef mince.
Moral of the story:
Don't feed you cat on chicken fillets.
That was a very, very near miss and (another) lesson to me that I do not have all of the answers! Occasionally reality bites you.
Peter
Addendum. There is a similar known problem with feeding whole ground rabbit carcasses to cats (of which I was aware, but had missed the selective taurine deficiency in white poultry meat):
Rabbit Carcasses for Use in Feline Diets: Amino Acid Concentrations in Fresh and Frozen Carcasses With and Without Gastrointestinal Tracts
Addendum. There is a similar known problem with feeding whole ground rabbit carcasses to cats (of which I was aware, but had missed the selective taurine deficiency in white poultry meat):
Rabbit Carcasses for Use in Feline Diets: Amino Acid Concentrations in Fresh and Frozen Carcasses With and Without Gastrointestinal Tracts
Wow, what a story. This deserves its own veterinarian case-report!
ReplyDeleteMy cat is currently eating 15-20% raw fat beef mince + canned sardines (with bones) + tuna every ~10 days + our leftovers. She's quite athletic/muscly compared to other domestics cats i've handled. she also got back to running/playing 2-3 weeks after falling 4 floors onto concrete, breaking her tibia and cracking her hip
Moral of the story: beef mince (ground beef) is a super-food.
ReplyDeleteIt's mostly what we're feeding our dogs. We started with that and liver & heart, but either organ now gives them diarrhea almost immediately, I suspect from iron surfeit.
They still love the liver treats, though.
Good detective work, Peter. I'm glad Mini is recovering. Not a hunter, then?
ReplyDeleteMy cat KAOS gets a raw pastured chicken neck every morning. Those are getting harder to come by, so I just got a package of backs to try. I guess I could grind them up if she won't eat them on her own; I believe backs are dark meat too. She also hunts a lot, gets the occasional trapped mouse, and whenever cutting up meat for my dinner I share with her. All supplemented with canned food.
She seems healthy for 11 years old. I figure instead of a highly engineered diet, a variety of good stuff will suffice.
-- I second that beef is a health food!
ReplyDeleteBut - there is SOME taurine in that part of chicken - and while cats need some - they don't need a huge amount. So I'm wondering if there was something about the source or processing of the chicken breast?
I'm also concerned that the nutrition 'facts' have changed with the industrialization of food production - for instance - wild chicken is not so high in LA..
That being said, I feed chicken legs to my cat
(Leeuwenhoek) - clamped with a battery clamp to a heavy cast iron frying pan. Pulling on the meat helps keep the teeth healthy. I wait till the bone is very clean - so he eats the cartilage and much of the joint as well. He also gets tuna water and left over tuna at times.
I'm curious what form exactly the "12% fat beef mice" comes in? (I've worried about the high LA diet for my cat as well).
So, before I actually read the post and leave a proper response:
ReplyDeleteIt’s Mothers’ Day, and two normally very separate worlds just collided to produce this gem right here:
https://i.imgur.com/hF8IMbz_d.webp?maxwidth=760&fidelity=grand
Had to share with you all 🤭
Wow. What a story! Poor baby, i'm so so glad you found the solution!
ReplyDeleteI wonder about her doing ok and not throwing up on mine anymore, was that just one more result if low taurine that resolved and allowed her to suggest her food properly? So glad she's okay now!!!
You are such a kind and lovely pet owner to put in all this thought and effort into her care, it's really heartwarming to read about. ❤️
I'm working on transitioning my pupper on to raw food, trying to avoid tummy upset. Long-haired small dog + the runs - not a good mix, lol!
Karl - "12% fat beef mice" is a typo for "12% fat beef mince". Ground beef.
(I do have mental images of plump cow-mice now though, lol!)
(Sorry about the typos, that's what i get for typing on mobile.)....
ReplyDeleteraphi, yes, I think the cardiologist was edging that way but I'd already switched to beef for 2-3 weeks pre scan and Mini is a swine to BS, we failed at home and a trip to the practice under managed heart failure is better avoided. Plus measuring taurine isn't particularly reliable, costs £££££££, comes with no staff discount, is done in the USA and the courier seems to swim there with the sample in one hand held above the waves. So not happening!
ReplyDeleteTucker, have to agree there! Personally mostly eating beef and eggs currently
cave, nope, not a hunter!!!!!!
karl, that was a paper published in 1990. It's talking about poultry white meat from the 80s. GOK how low it is today!
lapis, I feel your pain https://twitter.com/Peter_InNorfolk/status/1653764313696333826/photo/1
Peter
karl and lapis, thanks re the heads up about the mice, corrected. LMAO. What a typo!!!!!
ReplyDeleteP
After reading all these comments, I propose the word "mince" as the most easily-typoed/miss-auto-corrected word in the English language.
ReplyDeleteWhen I dictated the above sentence, it rendered it as "minutes". I rest my case.
"swine to BS"
ReplyDeleteBeing mildly conversant in British English, I get the swine part, but need help translating BS in this context. The standard definition is not working for me.
Ah, BS = Blood Sample!!!!!! She may have no teeth but she can wriggle like an eel! Claws still work perfectly well too.
ReplyDeletePeter
That's one lucky cat! Cardboard flavoured factory chicken never fails to disappoint but that's also another black mark against rabbit together with the strange business of rabbit starvation --- poisoning from too much protein (really? * ) and not enough fat but maybe the low levels of taurine in rabbit have something to do with that? Your cat seems to have had chicken poisoning.
ReplyDeleteThe rda of various nutrients is usually covered by a sufficient intake of fresh fatty meats and other chewy animal parts. It's the cure for scurvy, pellagra, beriberi, kwashiorkor, rickets and a heap of other diseases caused by neolithic food choices.
(*) Lean human plus lean meat = protein poisoning. Fat human plus lean meat = thinner but healthy human, so protein poisoning is a fat deficiency. If going below the lipid rda take some fat pills.
Interesting that cats conjugate their bile with taurine hence the duetary requirement but rabbits do that with glycine hence the mismatch. What do humans use?
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThis is what the German language wikipedia article on taurine says about cat food
ReplyDelete(I was reading up on taurine, hoping to find that it was animal derived - it isn't):
Animal Nutrition
In 1975, it was discovered that cats that did not receive taurine in their diet suffered from degenerative changes in the retina. This led to the conclusion that cats are unable to synthesize taurine.[14] Accordingly, ready-to-eat cat foods are fortified with taurine, and outdoor cats satisfy their taurine requirements via captured small animals.
[14] A. Catharine Ross, Benjamin Caballero, Robert J. Cousins, Katherine L. Tucker, Thomas R. Ziegler (eds.): Modern Nutrition in Health and Disease. 11th Edition. Wolters Kluwer, Baltimore 2014, ISBN 978-1-60547-461-8, page 719.
Repost after edits:
ReplyDeleteThanks for this nice "animal-interest" break from fructose. I must admit I haven't started the fructose series simply because it looked to intimidating.
Monster energy drinks contain about 0.4% taurine. Not that I suggest supplementing Mimi's diet with that crap. It's bad enough my son and his buddies compete for sourcing the most arcane special cans.
Can someone please translate the swine to BS for me? I've really been underexposed to British English for too long!
Now that this article is about meat, I don't feel bad because I am not so far off topic.
I was watching Dr. Sehault's video on low carb. Though he is usally pretty open minded, he still seems to believe red meat and sat fats are somewhat bad for you. Anyways, the gist of this video is that vegetable or whole grain LC (the latter being a contradiction in itself) seems to be protective against CVD and diabetis whereas animal fat and red meet LC seems to advance both CVD and diabetes. What the hell?? He seems to have singled out Neu5Cc as the culprit. This is a sialic acid made by most mammals but not humans. It gets incorporated into or rather onto human cells but drives low grade inflammation because the immune system recognizes it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeL7_0FgsfQ
He explains this hypothesis in more detail in an older video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRkRilP1OTU
There are also a couple of links below the video, the most interesting I find is a French study that breaks down Neu5Gc content by cheese and meet.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7510162/
Now if there is anything to this hypothesis, unfortunately, my favorite sheep and goat milk cheeses are probably best avoided. I do find is surprising that Parmesan is pretty far down the list. Regarding meats, liver seems to be a nono, quite contrary to its reputation in the LC world. For some strange reason, lamb also seems to have only 2/5 of the Neu5Gc of beef, so exactly the opposite of what is true for sheep vs. cow milk cheese.
Any takers?
"swine to BS" ---> difficult to get a blood sample from" ie a pig of a cat to work with. :))
ReplyDeleteBoth taurine and glycine are used to conjugate ( to adjust pH ) human bile acids. Taurine can be synthesised from glycine by adults but not by infants. Its used in other places of course, even found in rabbit hearts. I suspect that if you have a fatty diet you also need to have a meaty diet to get enough taurine. Just a hunch, but it would leave vegetable munchers using seed oils out in the cold..
I make food for our two cats of ground chicken thighs (50% of skin removed, 20-25% of bone removed), chicken liver, taurine (sometimes use chicken hearts and less taurine), salmon oil, B-100 vitamin pills, water, and vitamin e. They seem to be doing well except one of them likes vomiting in spurts every once in a while. The other has been over-grooming but not sure why - steroids didn't seem to help. I've been worried about if this diet is appropriate for cats due to the PUFA in the conventionally-raised farmed chicken. Would consider beef but not really fan of the cost unless it really is superior. If I can just feed beef mince withouth any other additives or bones, etc. it would be much more convenient though. Any thought would be appreciated greatly!
ReplyDeleteSalmon oil is also polyunsaturated. But maybe pufa is fine for small animals??? Are wild mice and insects high in pufa?
ReplyDeleteI used to have a cat that loved hunting moths and we get some giant moths here, as large as mice so he was busy in the moth season
Eric—based on your description and without watching the video, it sounds like your Dr. Sehault might be a victim of over-reductionism. "Vegetable or whole grain LC" kind of says it all. If a sialic acid made by most mammals but not humans gets incorporated into or rather onto human cells but drives low grade inflammation because the immune system recognizes it, one can't help wondering how humanity survived millions of years of hunting.
ReplyDeletePass:
ReplyDelete"swine to BS" ---> difficult to get a blood sample from" ie a pig of a cat to work with...
If you've ever blood sampled a pig or ten you would appreciate the swine to BS concept is derived from literal truth!
P
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteCave:
ReplyDeleteHis bias against sat fat is there, no question. The vegetable & whole grain better than SAD, sat fat & meat LC worse came from here
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3555979/
This is a metaanalysis that draws, among others, on the nurses study.
Back to Neu5Ga, I suppose it is either a question of dose or that some people are more susceptible than others. The English wikipedia article acknowledges plausibility but says proof is needed. The quotes are from 10 years ago. The French paper may provide the proof (note to self: read).
From Wikipedia:
Even though Neu5Gc is not known to be produced by any mechanism in the human body (due to lack of genes), our bodies do interact with trillions of microorganisms that are capable of complex biological reactions. Neu5Gc is reported to be found in concentration in human cancers, as well as in fecal samples, suggesting that humans ingest Neu5Gc as part of their diets. Uptake is thought to be by macropinocytosis, and the sialic acid can be transferred to the cytosol by a sialin transporter. It is possible that the immune system then recognizes the molecule as foreign, and that the binding of anti-Neu5Gc antibodies may then cause chronic inflammation. This assumption has yet to be concretely proven, however.[4] Further studies have shown that humans have Neu5Gc-specific antibodies, often at high levels.[3] Feeding Neu5Gc knockout mice Neu5Gc-rich diets along with anti-Neu5Gc antibodies (attempting to mimic a human system) causes systemic inflammation in the mice, and they are five times as likely to develop hepatocarcinomas.[9][10] However, a study released in September 2018 found no evidence that exposure to higher levels of anti-Neu5gc antibodies increased colon cancer risk.[11] The increased values of anti-Neu5Gc antibodies in patients with hypothyroidism/Hashimoto's disease raise the possibility of an association between anti-Neu5Gc antibody development and autoimmune hypothyroidism.[12]
"raise the possibility of an association" is the proper level of vagueness I think. As with all dietary experiments and particularly those on lab mice or involving unsatfat and meatophobia i dont think the results are necessarily useful.
ReplyDeleteHowever it warrants further investigation, give me some funding and I'll get some results for you.
Pass—👍
ReplyDeleteA trite question amongst the science heavy discussion, but I was wondering what are you eating nowadays Peter? You mentioned mainly focusing on beef and eggs; have you move away from dairy (butter, cream, etc.)?
ReplyDeleteThere you go Unknown. I stuck a few days up on twitter. Don't record all days and Spain last week was all preserved meat and cheese. I tend to avoid cheese but not 100%.
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/Peter_InNorfolk/status/1663580954462683136
Peter
Thanks Peter, and when you said mince and eggs you weren't kidding. Why avoid cheese? Too much protein? The dairy and insulin connection? I wondered how you'd eat at an airport or when travelling. Meat and cheese seems a fair compromise.
ReplyDeleteThanks Peter. When you said mince and eggs you weren't kidding! Why avoid cheese? Too much protein? The dairy and insulin connection? I wondered how you'd manage eating when at an airport or travelling. Meat and cheese seems a fair compromise.
ReplyDeleteFor the trip to Spain last week I had two (boiled) coffees at 6am then steak (and chips, I specifically decided to relax on the trip. Paid for it with an arthritis flare) at around 6pm. Stanstead airport was bereft of anything resembling food. No cheese, no preserved meats. No temptation. Carbfest was amazing!
ReplyDeleteP
Yes, when I was at airport recently I'd just read about Brad's croissant diet and there were plenty of those amongst the baguettes, but in my mind fasting was the better option!
ReplyDeleteCarbfest???
ReplyDeletehttps://www.behance.net/gallery/81880639/Carbfest
Not crab fest as google suggests???
Wow, Carbfest is a Thing!
ReplyDeleteP
So you've cut dairy because of arthritis flair ups (or was it the chips)? Compared to your "What I Eat" posts from 10 years ago you're even more restrictive now. Gone is the cream, the butter, the frankenfoods (almond flour), natures junk food (fruit) and chocolate? Is that by design or necessity?
ReplyDeleteI blame the chips, but the night before the flair was a formal meal with gluten free low meat fixed courses with some carbs. And ethanol from grapes...
ReplyDeleteI'm in the Carnivore Trap. I tried a month of strict paleo carnivore and noticed a number of changes to niggly problems which I didn't realise I had. Now when I break carnivore my back pain and/or finger/toe arthritis can flare. Occasional (deliberate) lapses are fine but, if sustained for a few days, I will pay.
Skipping dairy eliminates very mild IBD which I didn't realise was even an issue.
It's a trap. You have been warned.
Peter
Thanks for your reply Peter and yes, there's always a price to pay. Hyper fixation can be just as bad as the symptoms themselves (and perhaps even cause them), so careful what you wish for. Goes to show nobody has this all figured out.
ReplyDeleteAmen bro
ReplyDelete"Goes to show nobody has this all figured out"
P
I won't bore you with the horror of my weekend after I stupidly ate something sugary on friday. Obviously I went past one of my metabolic limits too far, too fast.
ReplyDeleteCarbfest, yep, their emblem is a pretzel. How twisted is that?
Pass, re https://www.behance.net/gallery/81880639/Carbfest. In the third poster they made a typo in their own name. Goes to show what carbs will do for your brain power 🤓
ReplyDeleteLast time I flew was 2017. Had a long layover at an airport, with of course nothing reasonable to eat. I ended up ordering a Philly steak and cheese sandwich and had them substitute a fork for the bread.
ReplyDeleteThese days I would probably take a container of hard boiled eggs and maybe some sausage or other meat.
Oh, you can post emojis! 😯
ReplyDeleteP
I chuckled at the bro reply Peter, I guess I went too far with the glib platitudes? Anyway, in for a penny ... from what I gather your focus is on longevity as an ahem, senior second-time around dad, to be around as long as possible for your children? So you're more than happy to be trapped in carnivore purgatory as long as it meets this goal, or do you ever find yourself unhappy having to manage it at all?
ReplyDeleteMaximising healthspan would be a good outcome to me, also being one of the people who push the population median lifespan in the correct direction would be nice too. Increasing maximum *individual* lifespan seems very much like a lottery, given normal growth hormone signalling. De Longo and Sinclair market the latter concept and sound like any marketing department...
ReplyDeletePeter
Yeah, I liked Longo's earlier work, but then he started monetizing it. Disappointing.
ReplyDeleteIn the substack which rejoices in the sublime moniker of "Black Death With Wi-Fi (A medievalist's views of past and present)", appears a post about taurine, of all things, and touches on other subjects of interest to people here. Highly recommended by this moss piglet.
ReplyDelete"You are what you eat—Taurine, meat and health." https://irinametzler.substack.com/p/you-are-what-you-eat
Off topic: Columbia's health authorities are going after sodium to lower CVD rates. As a consequence, Dijon mustard may no longer be sold. The article mentions that too much fried food along with meat is the real culprit. Maybe they should be going after the oil in the friers?
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/10/world/americas/colombia-dijon-mustard-shortage.html
More on topic, at least regarding the dicussion here, I had a pizza at a restaurant here in town for the second time in so many weeks and felt sick again afterwards. I reckon it must be the oil.
Via yellingstop:
ReplyDeletehttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37127715/
Quite contrary to what Brad has been saying recently, olive oil seems to be doing a lot of metabolically good things. If you are a small worm, at least.
Eric, just from the abstract: "MUFAs upregulate the number of lipid droplets in fat storage tissues." So MUFA make C elegans fat. However "...an organelle network involving lipid droplets and peroxisomes is critical for MUFA-induced longevity...". So MUFA make them fat but divert [some] fat oxidation away from mitochondria towards peroxisomes. Which generate ROS, as in their name. ROS = longevity *if* they induce SOD/catalase activation. This is usually by they causing mitochondrial RET but I'm open to peroxisomes as an alternative.
ReplyDeleteAlso re lowering sodium Hahahahaha.
cave, no time to check the link but taurine appears to be a hot topic at the moment.
Peter
These people are so lacking in imagination. Much more useful: a gut implant that you can use, via phone app and Bluetooth, to generate the desired supplement or commensal bacterium or pharmaceutical, right there in situ.
ReplyDeleteOr implant one in your cat and use it to generate taurine! Now you can feed chicken breast meat with abandon!
https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2021-05-10
Hubris!
ReplyDeleteP
Sorry guys, this is off-topic.
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/garytaubes/status/1667944944089309187
Gary Taubes has a new book coming out next year. I look forward to seeing if he is going to talk more about PUFA. In this Twitter thread he does address fats. He's careful to say that SFAs aren't necessarily bad, despite the fact that they "raise LDLs".
Hyperlipid readers, I assume, generally aren't afraid of LDLs or cholesterol. I'm just curious where he says unambiguously that SFAs raise LDLs. That appears to have been based on research he conducted 20 years ago, when most scientists were lipophobic. I'm just curious if this is an accurate statement.
When I went low-carb and therefore high-fat, my LDLs plummeted. Of course there's no way to disentangle the carb angle from the fat angle in this n=1. I was just curious about that statement about SFAs raising LDLs, as I've been under the impression that the opposite is actually the case.
It seems to vary but we have to consider the LMHR phenomenon, which looks like the same LDL raising effect of fasting (to me anyway)... So individuals wary, and not on an all-or-nothing basis.
ReplyDeleteP
It's solstice time! Happy Xmas from the other hemisphere.
ReplyDeleteHappy Christmas too!
ReplyDeleteP