What’s the Fuss Over Feline Fibre?
(or Feline Fibre – A new fad?)
Apparently it’s all about stool quality – and I don’t mean footstools...
There is an official stool quality grading system (1 to 5) and there are people assigned to assess same in dogs and cats (the Kings of England also had a Keeper of the Stool!), at the various nutrition centres around the world. In healthy cats, fibre is not an essential ingredient, but I guess if you return the the concept of a “natural diet” for cats, then the process of peeling mice prior to consuming them would have to provide fibre in the form of fur. I have not been able to find a figure on the proportion of soluble to insoluble fibre in mouse coats, but in quality commercial dried diets, 1:3 provides a desirable stool quality.
Soluble vs Insoluble Fibre
It seems to me that whenever a debate rages over a narrow field, there is probably not enough difference to warrant the energy of discussion, otherwise, the winner/better solution would be clear! It seems to depend on which fibre first took your research fancy as to whether it solves your problems, and human research is not always as helpful for felines as it is for dogs. So, soluble fibre is a complex carbohydrate that makes it past the cat’s digestive processes intact, and gets fermented in the large intestine so does not contribute to the calorie intake of the cat, but does feed the bacteria in the bowel. Insoluble fibre gets past everybody in the bowel and is deposited unchanged (a bit wetter) in the litter tray. What either of these types of fibre do for digestion of the other ingredients in the diet, or for general maintenance of the mucosal lining of the bowel, is the subject of debate.
There are a number of cats whose health is improved by increasing the amount fibre in their diets. These cats have “fibre responsive diseases”, and it doesn’t mean that every cat needs more fibre. It can actually be quite convenient to soluble vs insoluble fibre find stools in the litter tray only once a week when some cats have to (temporarily) live on a meat-only diet! Some other cats have to have a very “low residue” (fibre-free) diet for other reasons, so there is a spectrum. Thus the current list of fibre responsive problems is:
Obesity
This is the centre of the soluble vs insoluble regime debate. The fibre is used to allow the cat to eat the same volume of food without consuming the same number of calories. Both types of fibre do that, and each camp borders on vitriolic over what the other camp is doing to uptake of other nutrients and satiety, but suffice to say, cats will lose weight on either variety of reduced calorie compositions. However, you still have to feed the cat at 60% of the calorie requirement of the cat AT THE WEIGHT YOU WANT THE CAT TO BE! This turns out to be a very small amount, and most cats are very difficult to live with during the dieting time. We usually recommend you just try to have the intake reduced by 10-20% so the cat doesn’t gain any more weight. Obesity makes cats prone to diabetes but otherwise there is no downside to being a pretty happy fat old cat, except where the main problem is grooming themselves. And sometimes, problems with grooming are related to arthritis as much as obesity in an old cat. obesity
FIV
Cats with Feline Aids can develop diarrhoea, sometimes with blood in it. Increasing the amount of fibre of either type makes their life easier.
Food Allergy Colitis
Also called Irritable Bowel Syndrome – some cats have a problem with protein types in their food. Some are allergic to fish, others to beef and milk, but it can be to almost anything. The main symptom is blood on the faeces (red blood, on the outside), and can be associated with diarrhoea also. Once all the other problems causing these symptoms are eliminated, changing the food and adding fibre (especially psyllium husk–natural is eaten by more cats, but some can be conned into the Unflavoured Metamucil–-you will never get them to eat the citrus–flavoured one) keeps the problem at bay.
Diabetes Melitis
Insoluble fibre (wheat bran) was the first step in dietary control, then it moved to soluble fibre (oat bran) and now for cats it is moving to highly digestible protein. Things change in this area as more about CAT diabetes is discovered as opposed to extrapolated from dogs or humans.
Constipation vs Megacolon
Constipation vs Megacolon-–these conditions have been considered as part of the same problem, but there is now some discussion that constipation is a separate problem and does not lead inevitably to Megacolon. Constipation on its own, where the faeces is hard, dry and passed irregularly, does benefit from the addition of fibre (again psyllium husk, which is classified as soluble, but insoluble has helped in the past), which retains water in the stool and allows for the more regular passage of a softer faeces just because the bowel fills quicker to stimulate movement.
Megacolon is when the bowel has lost its muscular tone (possibly due to degeneration of the nerves that stimulate its motility) so the faeces sits around for a long time because it doesn’t get pushed along. The faecal balls become bigger, as does the colon diameter, and eventually the cat is unable to pass anything. This requires medical intervention in the form of flushing the faeces out (usually under anaesthetic) and following up with increased fibre diet and drugs which stimulate bowel movement. Eventually, these also stop working and then surgical removal of the nonfunctional section of the colon is needed for the cat to return to health. This procedure goes in and out of favour, but the techniques are now refined and do not leave the cat with longterm diarrhoea anymore.
So whence goes nutrition from here? We’re all living a much more ‘refined’ life these days, and commercial foods are here to stay. I think it is encouraging that the food producers are investigating the ‘special needs’ of cats so closely at last, and their research is improving life for lots of cats. However, the perfect package is still a mouse, and I always take my comparisons back to that.