[RSteyn]

>Some dry food may cause problems; not sure. But there are special foods you can buy to feed a cat with urinary problems. I think they have lower magnesium or low ash.<

I lost a cat to urethral blockage in 1974, and since then have read all kinds of theories about the cause of the problem. The acronyms don't even stay the same, reflecting the way no one really understands the condition completely.

Regarding dry food...Innova EVO contains an astonishing 6 % calories from carbohydrates, which appears to be unique among dry foods. Look under 'Natura':

http://www.geocities.com/jmpeerson/dryfood.html

which would appear to make it comparable to many of the better canned choices:

http://www.geocities.com/jmpeerson/canfood.html

Note that not all canned foods are good choices in terms of calories from carbhydrates--you must do your homework. Picking up any old can won't do these job, but at least there is an exception to the dry food problem [but what about water consumption?].

[pbmaltzman]

It's my understanding that Natura is the parent company, and Innova Evo is but one of their products. I've seen their website. Innova Evo is low carbohydrate, and although it does have some carbohydrates (from potatoes), it is advertised as being the only NO-GRAIN dry food on the market... all of which are reasons I am feeding it now to my three female tortoiseshell cats.

Thanks to the postings on this thread, I am having more and more qualms about feeding cats dry foods... astonishingly, when I had to take my youngest cat in for blood-tinged diarrhea, one of the techs told me to feed my cats dry food exclusively. She was railing against canned foods as "poison" and "bad for their teeth."

I've long been skeptical of a lot of orthodox medicine for humans; now I'm getting that way about veterinary medicine. And to think that as a kid I once wanted to be a veterinarian. Nowadays, I just type up medical reports for a living.

I saw the website which sells the frozen bones-and-raw-food diet; I could buy from them, but it would probably pay me to eventually buy a grinder and make my own food for my critters.

I live in California, where the cost of living is high, but I can usually buy California-raised chickens on sale for as low as 57 cents per pound. These locally-grown chickens (Foster Farms) are not organic, but are allegedly raised without hormones and antibiotics. For sure they look and taste better than the ones which have traveled thousands of miles to get to our markets.

For now the Innova Evo seems to be acceptable to my darlings. One of my cats, the longest-haired of the three, does hock up hairballs every once in a while, so a raw food diet would probably help her in this regard as well.

I've read a little bit about holistic vet medicine... I have read that people who follow the BARF diet and get holistic medicine for their pets, routinely have their cats live to something like 24 years without major problems.

I figure that a better critter diet will pay off in the long run, and will actually be cheaper than big vet bills. I can't afford thousands of dollars for vet bills, but I could eventually cough up the money for a food grinder and the supplements.

Thank you and all the others who have posted stuff regarding feline diet and diabetes. I kind of figured that the high level of carbohydrates in most commercial pet food was the culprit, but I've definitely learned something on this thread.

[pbmaltzman]

I used to get Fancy Feast for my cats a while back, once in a while... but then I noticed that the can labels were listing soy as an ingredient, and I refused to feed my cats anything with soy in it. So I stopped buying the stuff. I'd rather give the cats people food than feed them soy.

[pbmaltzman]

I used to think that veterinary medicine paid more attention to the proper care and feeding of its subjects... but considering the resistance of many veterinarians to the very idea of feeding a bones-and-raw-food diet, I've been forced to come to a different conclusion.

One of the rescue people in my area, who worked as a vet tech before having her first kid, got this horrified look on her face when I mentioned a raw-food diet.