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What to feed your Diabetic Cat |
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Why feeding a cat the correct diet can help with this health condition.
Diabetes is a common disease found in cats. In the vast majority of cases, it is directly linked to a high carbohydrate diet of dry food (carbohydrates convert to sugar).
Cats are by nature carnivores. A true carnivore is an animal that lives on a diet consisting only of meat. A cat may consume other products presented to it, but these products are not essential for good health and can actually cause damage to their health. True carnivores have difficulty digesting vegetable matter.
The food you feed your cat should be appropriate to cats for the overall health of the animal and should come pretty close to what the animal would normally eat in the wild. In the wild, cats would be eating rabbits, squirrels and mice (meat). They would not go to a cornfield or a rice paddy to find a meal of grain.
Since a cats body is not made to consume a high carbohydrate diet of grains or vegetables, feeding a diabetic cat a high carbohydrate diet is the same as trying to put out a fire with gasoline. Carbohydrates are long chains of sugar molecules linked together. Your cat's normal digestive process breaks up these chains into individual sugar molecules that pass through the intestinal wall and load up your cat's blood stream with sugar.
It is not recommend for any cat, much less a diabetic cat to eat any foods whose main ingredients is corn (meal), wheat, barley, rye, oats or rice. This also means no potatoes, carrots, beets, soy, peas, yams or beans. Feeding your cat this is little different than just pouring straight sugar into your cats bowl.
There is nothing magical about a diabetes-management diet for your cat other than finding foods that is low in carbohydrates, lower in carbohydrates than the majority of cat food products on the market.
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