For the record, science disagrees with you. According to an analysis of all current research, there is no statistically significant difference of cat heath when fed a nutritionally sufficient vegan diet. Of there is a similarly high quality study that finds that a nutritionally sufficient vegan diet is worse for cats I would love to see it.
The vegan diet we are talking about isn’t a bunch of vegetables, it’s a manufactured dry food specifically designed to have all the nutrients a cat needs.
People often use the obligate carnivore excuse, but use it in an unscientific way. Obligate carnivores have nutritional needs that can only be meet through meat in the wild, but humans are perfectly capable of manufacturing these nutrients. We are so good at it that we supplement these synthetic nutrients in meat based cat food already.
This is a contentious issue for most people, and it can be hard when you are very passionate about something to look at the evidence and change your opinion. I’ve looked at a decent number of studies on the topic recently, and they all seen to point to the conclusion that a diet without meat can be healthy for cats, so long as it contains all the nutrients they need.
Vegans be reposting this link everywhere not realizing how silly it makes them look. First, one of its big points is that there hasn’t been much research done into feeding cats vegan diets, mostly because it’s a bad idea.
Some great lines:
Cats on a high-protein vegetarian diet exhibited hypokalemia which accompanied recurrent polymyopathy. There was also increased creatinine kinase activity, likely reflecting the muscle damage caused by the myopathy, and reduced urinary potassium concentrations.
To simplify: even with protein supplements your cats muscles will decay over time.
showed that plasma taurine concentrations decreased by approximately 87% after only 2 weeks on a vegetarian diet (from 122 μmol/L to 16μmol/L). By the end of the 6-week study, there was no detectable taurine in plasma. Taurine concentrations were not different between the potassium-supplemented and non-supplemented groups, with both groups showing this substantial drop in taurine.
To simplify: Taurine supplements didn’t work. Though findings are mixed between all like, 3 studies that tried
In cats fed vegetarian diets that were supplemented with potassium, a myopathy was seen within 2 weeks of the dietary change this was characterized by ventroflexion of the head and the neck. The cats also showed lateral head resting, a stiff gait, muscular weakness, unsteadiness, and the occasional tremor of the head and pinnae.
To simplify: your car feels like shit and acts like they feel like shit
Weight loss and poor coat condition have also been observed in cats fed vegetarian diets. However, most cats in another study had a normal coat condition and no obviously diet-related clinical abnormalities picked up by clinical examination [27]. Clinical signs of lethargy with altered mentation, dysorexia, and muscle wasting, along with gut signs of bloating and increased borborygmi have also been observed [30].
Simplify: it was bad. Sometimes it wasn’t so bad, but lots of times it was bad and the owner should feel bad
I can keep going, literally every paragraph has some good “don’t fucking do that” material.
The specific study you are referencing in the first 3 quotes is this one. In this study, cats were fed a “human vegetarian” diet. It was not cat food supplemented with more protein, it was casserole mince. The issue isn’t that taurine suppliments don’t work, it’s that those cats didn’t ge any taurine. From the remaining studies in the analysis, cats did not have any issue with taurine on a diet of commercial vegan cat food.
For your last quote, the study they referenced is unfortunately behind a paywall. I do know it was a case study of only 2 cats, while there are other studies with a much larger sample size.
In the future, if you see the same citation used over and over in an article like this, is usually a good idea to go and read it. It will make your time understanding the rest of the article much easier.
I’m going to end with a quite from the publishers of this article that sums it up pretty well for me:
This review has found that there is no convincing evidence of major impacts of vegan diets on dog or cat health.
A vet friend in a very trendy city encounters a lot of cats with significant health problems that stem from their owner’s attempt at a vegan diet, so whether or not it’s possible, too many people harm the health of their pets through attempting a vegan diet for it to be a safe thing to recommend trying
Yea that’s the thing.
I’m sure a team of scientists could eventually design an ethically sourced vegan cat food with synthetic versions of whatever is missing that could work fine for some cats.
The odds of a random lemming doing it right after reading one comment about it online is next to none.
Discussing it is one thing, recommending it and deleting anything that simply advises caution is weird.
See, this is actually good reasoning for why owners shouldn’t force a vegan diet on pets. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done well, but the difficulty in meeting dietary needs creates significant health risks for many owners’ cats. And it’s fine to leave it there, but it doesn’t close the door on the idea forever.
Intresting paper. It is not the conclusive evidence that you think it is. It’s ok, reading science is hard.
Paper concluded that the vegan diet did not seem to have adverse effects, but they had a very small sample size and the expiriment went on for a very short duration.
And then they site scientific papers that disagree with their findings. So there definitely is science out there that disagrees with the vegan diet being ok.
Did you actually read the article? Cause I did and here are some highlights from the article regarding felines specifically:
Sample sizes are tiny
3.2. Feline Studies-Meta-analysis was considered if more than one study presented the same outcome data. However, meta-analyses of these data were not possible due to (1) differences or lack of a comparison group, e.g., a meat-based diet comparator or (2) no presentation of a measure of central tendency or dispersion to input into the model.
Hypokalemia is: a low level of potassium (K+) in the blood serum.[1] Mild low potassium does not typically cause symptoms.[3] Symptoms may include feeling tired, leg cramps, weakness, and constipation.[1] Low potassium also increases the risk of an abnormal heart rhythm, which is often too slow and can cause cardiac arrest
3.2.1. Hematology/Biochemistry-Only three studies [27,29,30] have carried out hematological and/or biochemical analysis of blood in cats that were fed vegetarian diets, and it is worth noting that sample sizes were low. Cats on a high-protein vegetarian diet exhibited hypokalemia which accompanied recurrent polymyopathy [29]. There was also increased creatinine kinase activity, likely reflecting the muscle damage caused by the myopathy, and reduced urinary potassium concentrations.
Myopathy is: a disease of the muscle[1] in which the muscle fibers do not function properly.
3.2.3. Clinical Findings-In cats fed vegetarian diets that were supplemented with potassium, a myopathy was seen within 2 weeks of the dietary change [29]. This was characterized by ventroflexion of the head and the neck. The cats also showed lateral head resting, a stiff gait, muscular weakness, unsteadiness, and the occasional tremor of the head and pinnae… Weight loss and poor coat condition have also been observed in cats fed vegetarian diets [29,30]. However, most cats in another study had a normal coat condition and no obviously diet-related clinical abnormalities picked up by clinical examination [27]. Clinical signs of lethargy with altered mentation, dysorexia, and muscle wasting, along with gut signs of bloating and increased borborygmi have also been observed [30].
These are guardian based reports which means there is significant bias from the owner to report positive effects and look over the negatives
3.2.4. Guardian-Reported Health Effects-Guardians generally believed that the transition to a meat-free diet had been positive. These studies are valuable, as large sample sizes of respondents (animals) are generally employed. Some guardians did notice an increase in stool volume but noted no issues with consistency [27]. When considering other aspects, coat condition was shinier [27], there was an improved scent of their animals (particularly relating to breath odor) [27], there was a tendency to be at the ideal body condition score rather than being obese [28,31].
This is about as close as you can get to justifying it , IF you fixate on ONE aspect and ignore everything else in the journal article:
Dodd et al. (2021) [31] collected dietary information for 1026 cats, of whom 187 were fed vegan diets. The latter were more frequently reported by guardians to be in very good health. They had more ideal body condition scores and were less likely to suffer from gastrointestinal and hepatic disorders than cats that were fed meat. No health disorders were found to be more likely in cats that were fed vegan diets. The reported differences were statistically significant.
So please explain to me how myopathy setting in and causing tremors after only two weeks of transitioning to a non meat based diet is good for cats?
So for the record you are dead flat wrong by your own damn source because you didn’t read it or you ignored all the bad parts.
I noticed you forgot to include a very important contextual sentence for your myopathy quote:
Only three studies [27,29,30] have carried out hematological and/or biochemical analysis of blood in cats that were fed vegetarian diets, and it is worth noting that sample sizes were low. Cats on a high-protein vegetarian diet exhibited hypokalemia which accompanied recurrent polymyopathy [29]. There was also increased creatinine kinase activity, likely reflecting the muscle damage caused by the myopathy, and reduced urinary potassium concentrations. Potassium supplementation prevented development of this myopathy, strongly suggesting a link between the potassium and myopathy.
Meaning there was a health problem when one of the cats’ dietary needs wasn’t being met, which no longer appeared when the deficiency was corrected.
Even so, no one was trying to claim every conceivable vegan food mix is healthy for a cat. Of course trying to switch an animal who would be a carnivore in nature to a healthy synthetic vegan diet would be difficult. But there only needs to be one diet that succeeds to show it’s possible. And unless you’re going to claim literally all of the vegan cat guardians who reported healthy cats are lying about their cat’s health or diet, that requirement has been met.
Happy to see someone who read through the analysis! I just looked back at your criticism and you make stone goods points. I did notice that almost all the negative effects are coming from the same citation in the study, so I looked into the study they are citing there. Here’s a link to the PDF of that study.
The main take away for me from this study is that they were feeding the cats a “vegetarian human diet,” specifically casserole mince along with a couple others. Feeding these cats a diet designed for humans is obviously bad, but it doesn’t speak to commercial food designed for cats. You can use this to say that a homemade vegan diet is not good for cats. I’ve always said, don’t do a homemade diet for your pets.
There were also negative outcomes from citation 30, but the full text is behind a paywall, so I can’t really check on it. Of anyone has a copy I’d love to read it.
The studies that did use commercially available cat foods (literally all the other studies linked) found that the cats fed a vegan diet were within the range for regular healthy cats.
I am not making the claim that vegan diet is healthier. I am not claiming that you can make your own cat food at home. My specific claim is that there is not a statistically significant difference in the health of cats that eat commercially available vegan cat food. If you have a similar quality study to the contrary, please post it. Until that happens, I’m going to stick with the researchers who published the study, when they say:
Perhaps a take-home message is that use of commercially prepared vegan pet foods appear to be safe for use in cats and dogs but further research is needed.
First of all, that analysis you posted is not particularly scientific, and there’s an abundance of evidence that vegan diets hurt cats.
Second, once you’re getting into arguments about “synthetic nutrients”, it’s pretty clear that you don’t actually know how animals nutrition works, and probably shouldn’t have a pet at all if you don’t know how to keep one without making it suffer due to malnutrition.
Not sure why you’re vegan, but it certainly isn’t because you care about the well-being of animals…
Taurine is an essential amino acid for cats that is present in animal products. During the manufacturing process of cat food, it is heated to high temperature and some odds this natural taurine is destroyed. To make up for this, synthetic taurine is added back in. This synthetic taurine is made in a lab, and (from wikipedia) in 1993, 5000-6000 tonnes were produced.
If you have any more questions, or any studies or other academic sources I should look at, please don’t hesitate to post them.
For the record, science disagrees with you. According to an analysis of all current research, there is no statistically significant difference of cat heath when fed a nutritionally sufficient vegan diet. Of there is a similarly high quality study that finds that a nutritionally sufficient vegan diet is worse for cats I would love to see it.
The vegan diet we are talking about isn’t a bunch of vegetables, it’s a manufactured dry food specifically designed to have all the nutrients a cat needs.
People often use the obligate carnivore excuse, but use it in an unscientific way. Obligate carnivores have nutritional needs that can only be meet through meat in the wild, but humans are perfectly capable of manufacturing these nutrients. We are so good at it that we supplement these synthetic nutrients in meat based cat food already.
This is a contentious issue for most people, and it can be hard when you are very passionate about something to look at the evidence and change your opinion. I’ve looked at a decent number of studies on the topic recently, and they all seen to point to the conclusion that a diet without meat can be healthy for cats, so long as it contains all the nutrients they need.
heavy sigh
Vegans be reposting this link everywhere not realizing how silly it makes them look. First, one of its big points is that there hasn’t been much research done into feeding cats vegan diets, mostly because it’s a bad idea.
Some great lines:
To simplify: even with protein supplements your cats muscles will decay over time.
To simplify: Taurine supplements didn’t work. Though findings are mixed between all like, 3 studies that tried
To simplify: your car feels like shit and acts like they feel like shit
Simplify: it was bad. Sometimes it wasn’t so bad, but lots of times it was bad and the owner should feel bad
I can keep going, literally every paragraph has some good “don’t fucking do that” material.
Hey thanks for reading the analysis!
I just have a couple points:
The specific study you are referencing in the first 3 quotes is this one. In this study, cats were fed a “human vegetarian” diet. It was not cat food supplemented with more protein, it was casserole mince. The issue isn’t that taurine suppliments don’t work, it’s that those cats didn’t ge any taurine. From the remaining studies in the analysis, cats did not have any issue with taurine on a diet of commercial vegan cat food.
For your last quote, the study they referenced is unfortunately behind a paywall. I do know it was a case study of only 2 cats, while there are other studies with a much larger sample size.
In the future, if you see the same citation used over and over in an article like this, is usually a good idea to go and read it. It will make your time understanding the rest of the article much easier.
I’m going to end with a quite from the publishers of this article that sums it up pretty well for me:
A vet friend in a very trendy city encounters a lot of cats with significant health problems that stem from their owner’s attempt at a vegan diet, so whether or not it’s possible, too many people harm the health of their pets through attempting a vegan diet for it to be a safe thing to recommend trying
Yea that’s the thing.
I’m sure a team of scientists could eventually design an ethically sourced vegan cat food with synthetic versions of whatever is missing that could work fine for some cats.
The odds of a random lemming doing it right after reading one comment about it online is next to none.
Discussing it is one thing, recommending it and deleting anything that simply advises caution is weird.
See, this is actually good reasoning for why owners shouldn’t force a vegan diet on pets. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done well, but the difficulty in meeting dietary needs creates significant health risks for many owners’ cats. And it’s fine to leave it there, but it doesn’t close the door on the idea forever.
Intresting paper. It is not the conclusive evidence that you think it is. It’s ok, reading science is hard.
Paper concluded that the vegan diet did not seem to have adverse effects, but they had a very small sample size and the expiriment went on for a very short duration.
And then they site scientific papers that disagree with their findings. So there definitely is science out there that disagrees with the vegan diet being ok.
Did you actually read the article? Cause I did and here are some highlights from the article regarding felines specifically:
Sample sizes are tiny
Hypokalemia is: a low level of potassium (K+) in the blood serum.[1] Mild low potassium does not typically cause symptoms.[3] Symptoms may include feeling tired, leg cramps, weakness, and constipation.[1] Low potassium also increases the risk of an abnormal heart rhythm, which is often too slow and can cause cardiac arrest
Myopathy is: a disease of the muscle[1] in which the muscle fibers do not function properly.
These are guardian based reports which means there is significant bias from the owner to report positive effects and look over the negatives
This is about as close as you can get to justifying it , IF you fixate on ONE aspect and ignore everything else in the journal article:
So please explain to me how myopathy setting in and causing tremors after only two weeks of transitioning to a non meat based diet is good for cats?
So for the record you are dead flat wrong by your own damn source because you didn’t read it or you ignored all the bad parts.
I noticed you forgot to include a very important contextual sentence for your myopathy quote:
Meaning there was a health problem when one of the cats’ dietary needs wasn’t being met, which no longer appeared when the deficiency was corrected.
Even so, no one was trying to claim every conceivable vegan food mix is healthy for a cat. Of course trying to switch an animal who would be a carnivore in nature to a healthy synthetic vegan diet would be difficult. But there only needs to be one diet that succeeds to show it’s possible. And unless you’re going to claim literally all of the vegan cat guardians who reported healthy cats are lying about their cat’s health or diet, that requirement has been met.
Happy to see someone who read through the analysis! I just looked back at your criticism and you make stone goods points. I did notice that almost all the negative effects are coming from the same citation in the study, so I looked into the study they are citing there. Here’s a link to the PDF of that study.
The main take away for me from this study is that they were feeding the cats a “vegetarian human diet,” specifically casserole mince along with a couple others. Feeding these cats a diet designed for humans is obviously bad, but it doesn’t speak to commercial food designed for cats. You can use this to say that a homemade vegan diet is not good for cats. I’ve always said, don’t do a homemade diet for your pets.
There were also negative outcomes from citation 30, but the full text is behind a paywall, so I can’t really check on it. Of anyone has a copy I’d love to read it.
The studies that did use commercially available cat foods (literally all the other studies linked) found that the cats fed a vegan diet were within the range for regular healthy cats.
I am not making the claim that vegan diet is healthier. I am not claiming that you can make your own cat food at home. My specific claim is that there is not a statistically significant difference in the health of cats that eat commercially available vegan cat food. If you have a similar quality study to the contrary, please post it. Until that happens, I’m going to stick with the researchers who published the study, when they say:
First of all, that analysis you posted is not particularly scientific, and there’s an abundance of evidence that vegan diets hurt cats.
Second, once you’re getting into arguments about “synthetic nutrients”, it’s pretty clear that you don’t actually know how animals nutrition works, and probably shouldn’t have a pet at all if you don’t know how to keep one without making it suffer due to malnutrition.
Not sure why you’re vegan, but it certainly isn’t because you care about the well-being of animals…
Taurine is an essential amino acid for cats that is present in animal products. During the manufacturing process of cat food, it is heated to high temperature and some odds this natural taurine is destroyed. To make up for this, synthetic taurine is added back in. This synthetic taurine is made in a lab, and (from wikipedia) in 1993, 5000-6000 tonnes were produced.
If you have any more questions, or any studies or other academic sources I should look at, please don’t hesitate to post them.
You are a danger to animals. Stop believing what you want to believe and look at the research
It seems like they did
I’m happy to do research. Care to post some academic literature on the subject?