From your source:
There are some commercial vegan diets available which have synthetically made nutrients to replace those found only in animal based ingredients.
The discussion is about commercial vegan cat food, which had the nutrients cats need, just sourced without killing other animals. The science on these diets is still relatively new, but early studies are looking pretty good.
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:
This review has found that there is no convincing evidence of major impacts of vegan diets on dog or cat health.
I’m happy to do research. Care to post some academic literature on the subject?
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.
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.
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.
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Most of what it worthwhile to buy from Amazon can be found in a physical store or from the manufacturers website. Do a bit of research beforehand and it’s very easy to be confident that you’re not going to need to return what you buy.