In Which Two People Talk At Great Length About Cat Food and The Research Pertaining TheretoKhelmar is an SA Forums goon who's also a vet, and one day we went at it hammer-and-tongs when somebody provided a link to this website. He quickly scanned it and called it "full of shit," and since I'm a pugnacious beyotch, I leapt up to defend it. But things got cordial very quickly (he's really, really polite and reasonable--obviously this man does not know how arguments are supposed to be conducted on the Internet) and I thought the conversation interesting enough to include here. (Warning: when I say interesting, I really mean "Long, detailed and probably boring as fuck for people who aren't really interested in these sorts of issues.) He brings up lots of very good points about the limitations of research, among other things. White box = Me |
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Note: pet peeve activated, rant coming up.
That web site is full of shit. Do you have any IDEA how many pets eat Science Diet and Iams every day and have no problems? All this crap about "preservatives" is total and utter nonsense. Find me a scientific study that compares ANY of the "non-preservative" diets to a standard, good-quality prepared food (Iams, Science Diet, Purina, etc.), and shows a statistically significant health difference between the two groups.
Why do you think Purina One ISN'T a good, healthy diet? Hell, my dog has eaten that for years and is fine. My cats eat either Hill's Science Diet Light or Iams' Light, and are totally normal (so far, except for the fact that they're psycho little SOBs like all cats... =) ). vet's instructions till they lose weight. I am under orders to make sure the girls eat and not hold out until they eat becasue they are in danger of fatty liver disease...and they are supposed to eat and not starve themselves which is almost what they are doing. They really hate the different weight control/lite etc foods with a passion and are barely eating when it is given to them.
Yes, obese cats are at risk for hepatic lipidosis (fatty liver) when they stop eating. My recommendation is stop reading the stupid BS put out by the "organic food" people, and feed them a good quality diet that they're willing to eat. The Purina seems to fit the bill. Finally, as an aside, I know that Hills and Iams do feeding trials of all their foods to make sure it matches the guidelines of the animal nutrition organization (AAFCO?). Do these companies? Or do they just say, "well, we have all the ingredients, so we'll be OK." |
Ooof, talk about pet peeves.... People who shoot off without reading what I wrote closely are right up there too. I put together that website. I provided a lot of documentation that supported what I said about what was wrong with many of the popular brands of cat food, especially dry food. If you actually studied what I said and looked at the whole website, you'd realize that preservatives are the least of my issues with commercial cat food. I go on much longer about quality control, the use of soy, and the inappropriateness of carbohydrate in a cat's diet, or how dry food doesn't provide enough water--among other things. If you have studies documenting that quality control for by-products is beyond excellent, that soy provides unique nutrients while not causing any problems, that cats need carbs or that cats on dry food get as much water as cats on canned and are equally or less prone to FLUTD, feel free to provide citations. If these studies are not available on-line, I will request them via interlibrary loan. Have you studied the requirements for making AAFCO nutritional adequacy claims? Do you know how long they're run, how many animals are required to be in it, how many are required to finish etc? Did you take any nutrition classes while in vet school? I can think of at least one study in which pregnant cats eating kitten food gave birth to kittens with severe birth defects because of copper deficiencies. This food passed AAFCO feeding trials. All AAFCO feeding trials show is that it won't kill adult cats in 6 months, kittens in 10 weeks, or pregnant cats from estrus to 6 weeks after the birth of kittens. Are you aware of how many cats DON'T do well on the foods you mentioned? The obesity rate is about 20, 25% for cats, and feline diabetes is on the rise. And there IS a study showing that cats being fed commercial "premium" brands (that would be Iams and Science Diet) are more likely to be obese. It's linked to from the full-of-shit website. Check it out, it's called "Diet and Feline Obesity" by Susan Donoghue and Janet M. Scarlett. The same study also documents how unsuccessful, by and large, diet cat foods tend to be. And this exactly the problem that Amethyste is trying to address. Obesity. Join the Feline IBD Yahoo! group some time and take note of the overwhelming anecdotal evidence you find there that commercial food (especially commercial dry food) isn't good for cats, and that switching to either home-made or high-quality canned resulted in a turnaround. One such story can be found here, in fact: http://portland.tribe.net/thread/fb...cd7756b&r=10288 And another can be found here: http://www.catnutrition.org And count me in as having cats who didn't do well on commercial cat food. Eric's coat was dry and sort of brittle, their breath stank, their shits were awful, Hitler looked like she'd walked through a blizzard. This was after a month on Science Diet Kitten. I switched to Nutro and saw a big improvement, but I wasn't satisfied, and Eric seriously started to pork out. It wasn't until I switched them to home-made and canned food that they started to do really, really well. Edit to add: Oh Christ, let's not forget that many brands of cat food didn't contain enough taurine until the late 80s, causing cardiomyopathy and retinal degeneration. These are also cat foods that passed feeding trials. misshepeshu fucked around with this message at Oct 05, 2004 around 19:04 |
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First of all, let me apologize for the antagonistic tone of my previous post - I sounded like a real asshole, and I shouldn't have. I appreciate that you wrote me a thoughtful, well-reasoned response despite that, and I hope this is a little more in keeping with that.
I did read what you had to say. You mentioned that the scientific evidence for many of the compounds was iffy at best, and then you mention that there was a study that suggested ethoxyquin was safe, although the study was flawed. However, you present no studies showing that any of the compounds are NOT safe. You also produce no circumstantial evidence showing they are dangerous. Most studies of "carcinogens" are done in rats. Generally, the rats are fed (or exposed to) megadoses of the material for months at a time, and the incidence of tumors is compared to control groups. That's not the same thing at all as feeding something to an animal over time. Furthermore, you mention that hyperthyroidism has become a large problem in older cats, and it has happened recently. Hyperthyroidism IS a large problem in older cats, and the incidence has gone up in the last 20 years. However, our ability to get cats to the age where they are susceptible to hyperthyroidism has significantly improved, while feeding practices in commercial cat foods haven't. True, more cats are on commercial cat foods, but you're attributing cause where there is no proven link. The same could be said about anything there's more of now - that doesn't mean there's a link.
First, dry food has a minimal amount of water in it. That's why any animal being fed dry food needs to have free-choice water available. There is no proven treatment for idiopathic FLUTD, including increased water intake. As far as I can tell, no clinically-controlled study has looked at it - increased water intake is only useful in treating cases of FLUTD brought on by crystals in the urine, not idiopathic FLUTD (which is what your site mostly discusses, as you mention the frequent lack of crystals in the urine). This is the closest article I could find, which says there isn't a treatment for idiopathic FLUTD:
The other articles I could find were discussing whether aminophiline is useful in FLUTD - the latest says that it isn't, although there are previous ones stating it is. As far as soy goes, I can say that I don't think soy provides unique nutrients, but I don't think ANYTHING provides a "unique" nutrient. You can add anything to anything now; look at people trying to have "vegan" cats adding taurine to veggies. I don't have any good evidence for harm, either - I'd want to see the science. As far as "by-product control" goes, how does one define a by-product? As something harmful in the food? If so, I haven't seen anything proving there is anything harmful in these foods.
Yes, I have studied (briefly) AAFCO's requirements, and you are correct, they fall into a number of categories. No, I don't (off the top of my head) know how long or how many animals are in each study - it's not many, depending on the statistics that come out of the study, if I remember correctly. Yes, I did take a nutrition class in vet school. Was it a great class? No, I freely admit that. I'm no expert in nutrition, although I have read some about it. The journal article J Nutr. 2000 May;130(5):1287-90 references the AAFCO study you're referring to - they found that in three feeds, actually, but all used the copper oxide instead of one of the other two copper sources for copper. The study I referenced above (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...1&dopt=Abstract) mentions that dietary copper levels at the minimum (I'm assuming NRC is) National Research Council's level of 5mg/kg of diet is somewhat low. However, they draw that conclusion from prolonged times to conception; once pregnant, those cats had similar birth rates, litter sizes, and no evidence of birth defects. And I will admit to ignorance about the AAFCO feeding trials referenced - if the food passed, did it pass as a maintanence food, or as a growth or pregnancy food? Did the manufacturer market it as is? If so, did they market it as a maintanence only food?
So you're blaming the food being fed for obesity, and not the owners doing the feeding? Yes, food is a component of obesity (for an example, I use myself), but the owner shares some of the blame (again, I am to blame for eating things and not exercising; I was to blame when one of my cats was overweight because she was fed free-choice Science Diet). Cats as pets don't get the exercise and are fed more than cats in the wild; therefore, they will tend to gain weight.
Have YOU read this study? Because they're comparing dry vs. semi-moist or moist foods. All commercial foods. No non-commercial foods. So the "unhealthy" dry foods create obesity, while the "unhealthy" wet foods don't?
I see quite a few samples of IBD every year under my microscope. The problem with IBD is that it's a completely non-specific diagnosis. Our diagnostic lab's criteria for IBD is having the crypts elevated from the muscularis mucosa by inflammatory cells. The most common form of IBD is lymphoplasmacytic, meaning there are too many lymphocytes and plasma cells. The problem with that diagnosis is that it lumps a LOT of things together into one package. I've always liked this analysis, although it's more focused on endoscopic vs. surgical biopsies: http://www.histovet.com/W96.asp Many of these cats may have food allergies, and for them, a diet change is completely appropriate. However, you can't say that Planter's is a bad company because they make peanuts that some people are allergic to! You're talking about a small subset of the feline population. Millions of cats eat these diets every day, and a hundred thousand or so have problems? Those cats need to eat something else, but why villify the food for a problem they didn't cause?
Great! It works for you, and I'm fine with that. You had a problem, and you solved it by switching to home-made diets. But those don't work for a lot of people (when you go to work at 7am and get back at 9pm, it's hard to cook for you, let alone you and the pets). I'm just see a lot of people pressuring others who have no problems with their current foods to switch to something because of perceived "universal" problems. This is emphasized to me on your site when you call most store-bought foods "bad". They aren't bad foods, they just don't work for you.
Mostly because no one knew about cats and taurine until the late 80s. NO cat food contained enough taurine at that point. Veterinarians didn't realize that taurine caused a problem, and attributed DCM in cats to old age. Now, having said that, you may wonder how that fits in with my statements about hyperthyroidism above. There is more than adequate science to prove taurine deficiency causes blindness due to retinal degeneration and DCM. There is no scientific evidence linking hyperthyroidism and anything in food. If someone does a study to prove there's a link, I'll be right there with you with a torch and a pitchfork yelling for Hills and Iams to change their foods. I've seen enough animals suffering with a number of different conditions that I'm willing to complain to get things changed. I'm just against going off half-cocked without the correct science to back a position up. |
Actually, I believe my exact quote about hyperT on the website said "soy fucks with thyroid hormones" and then provides a link to a PubMed abstract detailing how soy elevates T4 levels (both total T4 and free T4). I don't go into much more detail than that. You're right, my next two sentences imply direct causation and can be read deceptively, and I'll modify that entry as soon as I can. But regardless, I wouldn't want to feed my cats any food containing substances that elevated their T4 in such a way, especially not as a long-term, sole ration. It may or may not lead to hyperT down the line, but why take the risk?
Yes, but many nutrition texts also talk about how cats adjust their water intake to the dry matter content of their food, not the water content like most other animals do. Their thirst instinct also seems less sensitive than other animals'. End result? Cats on dry-food only diets get 50% of the total water that cats on wet-food-only diets do. Which leads to a discussion about....
Epidemiologic surveys done in the 70s and 80s did show that dry-food diets were predisposing factors for FLUTD of all sorts (I imagine urolithiasis would be more common in cats on dry food diets because of the more concentrated urine). And interestingly enough, a 1997 survey identified dry food as a risk factor for idiopathic FLUTD. I got those tidbits from a survey on diet and FLUTD. And one study in 1998 showed that idiopathic FLUTD had much lower instances of recurrence when treated with a prescription wet diet (11% recurrence) vs. a dry diet (39%). So no, there is no foolproof, clinically-proven treatment for idiopathic FLUTD, but the current body of evidence indicates that avoiding dry food seems to decrease the chances of a cat developing it, while using wet food to treat it decreases the chances of recurrences. It may be related to factors other than water intake, but since at least one study has shown that hematuria induced in cats by feeding a high-magnesium dry food diet was abolished when the food was made into a slurry containing about 80% water (another tidbit from the survey I linked to above), I think the evidence points to the fact that high-moisture diets may indeed help prevent FLUTD in the first place, and prevent recurrences of FLUTD when they do happen.
My point in going on and on about soy was: there are lots of good foods that don't use soy, and soy has been proven to decrease plasma taurine levels (rice bran is also notorious for this), elevate T4 levels in cats, contain large amounts of phytic acid (though this isn't unique to soy, all grains and legumes contain varying amounts of phytates though soy apparently has more than just about everything we know of), etc. ad nauseam. Soy doesn't exactly provide anything essential or unique to cat food, so why feed a food that contains it? That's the crux of my point.
Tsk. I know you think my research is sloppy, but give me enough credit to not engage in such circular reasoning. I use the AAFCO definition for by-products. I thought my point made that clear, since the exact quote from my site is: "The AAFCO definition of by-products encompasses a whole lotta different bits of an animal, which means the contents for each batch can vary quite a bit." Generally speaking, the more variability you allow in a single product definition, the more difficult it is to enforce strict quality control. I linked to one study that talks about this issue and to one lay website that discusses it in some depth without getting too hippie-hysterical about it. This is an acknowledged industry problem; it even gets a mention in Small Animal Clinical Nutrition, which mentions how it can be composed of digestible bits like liver, or relatively undigestible bits, like udders. I also mention the issue with potentially hazardous levels of certain minerals and fat-soluble vitamins in commercial foods (not pulling this out of my ass, I'm pulling this from Small Animal Clinical Nutrition again) and wonder if it might be related to by-product use, since by-products tend to be high in organ meats which generally contain a more vitamin A and D than muscle meat (now that part I AM pulling out of my ass, though I don't think it's an OMG OUT OF NOWHERE assumption).
If you go to the How To Read Labels, I have a section detailing the number of cats, length of time required for the study, blood parameters they look at, etc. Scroll down until you see a section entitled "Statements of Nutritional Adequacy." Again, this information was adapted from Small Animal Clinical Nutrition.
Actually, we're talking about two completely different studies. The study you're referring to doesn't use any commercial diet, in fact they specify that they use a purified diet, so there's no question of an AAFCO trial or anything else; the study you linked to was designed to find copper requirements for queens. This is the case study I'm referring to, which I'm paraphrasing from Small Animal Clinical Nutrition, 4th ed., pp. 103-104: - A group of breeding DSH cats were showing problems
with reproduction, with problems including failure to conceive, fetal
resorption (mmmmm), cannibalism, small, weak kittens, and somewhat
severe coat and skeletal abnormalities in neonatal kittens. The full citation for this is: Morris JG, Rogers QR. Copper Oxide is an ineffective source of copper in queen diets. In: Proceedings, Pet Food Forum, Chicago IL, 1995: 107-108.
The owners share some of the blame too, of course. I say as much on my website, and in my recommendation to Amethyste, I tell her to exercise her cats thoroughly and to feed in controlled portions, adjusting the food she puts down depending on how fast or how slow her cats lose weight. But I've many encountered cats being fed small portions (and I mean about 1/4 cup a day) of high-fiber, calorie-restricted diet dry food and they're STILL not losing weight. My ex-boyfriend had a cat like this, I've encountered a few others while volunteering at the Humane Society, and another person I've talked to on-line has this same problem. If you're interested in the specific biochemistry of why this might be, try reading Zoran's "The Carnivore Connection to Nutrition in Cats".
I've read the study several times, actually. And I'm fully aware that it compares only commercial food. I typed my initial response to you in the heat of the moment, as it were, and somewhat muddled my points. Sorry. At any rate, your original point was that many, many cats eat Iams and Hill's without any problems, and my retort was a somewhat childish "NU-UH, and here's a study to show you that premium foods do seem linked to at least one major feline health problem, i.e. obesity." Anyway, your statement that "unhealthy" dry foods tend to create obesity while "unhealthy" wet foods don't is actually quite accurate, even if it wasn't intended to be. This is borne out by the survey (cats on dry food are more at risk for obesity than cats on wet food). It boils down to a fairly simple concept: No matter how crappy wet food is, it's almost always higher in protein than crappy dry food unless you're feeding funky prescriptions of both, e.g. Hill's l/d canned contains less protein than Hill's m/d dry. Cats have a difficult time dealing with large carbohydrate loads; they lack hepatic glucokinase activity, though they do have normal hexokinase activity, but even this is not adaptable. They produce only 5% of the amylase that dogs do, and they lack fructase. In short: they suck at having to use starches for energy, which makes sense since they evolved to derive their energy needs almost exclusively from protein and fat, i.e. through gluconeogenesis. Cats on dry food tend to have large spikes in blood sugar they're not designed to deal with; the upshot of all this is that all this excess sugar is eventually converted to fat. Again, read the Zoran article for more details on the biochemistry behind this, I'm summarizing with wild abandon and it's late. But I also say on my site that cats on canned food also tend to be fed in portioned-out meals, which means cats on canned food are also less likely to be overfed. But that doesn't address the Mystery Cats who are portion-fed diet dry food but who still cling stubbornly to their weight.
Actually, where in my site do I call most store-bought foods bad? I mostly provide guidelines for what I think are good ingredients to look for and nad ingredients to avoid with fairly detailed explanations for why I think that way, plus a very long section on how to interpret labels and how to calculate approximate dry matter protein and fat content based on the guaranteed analyses provided on labels. If you look at the list of foods I consider "good", I list 17.5 (I consider Wysong a half-recommendation) brands vs. 12 named brands that were considered "bad" or "ugly." A ringing condemnation of all commercial food indeed. What I tend to consider "bad" foods are foods that I think are inappropriate for cats--too high in carbs, not enough protein, inferior protein sources, not enough water, etc. It'll support life, but it'll tend to cause or at least contribute to problems like obesity, diabetes or FLUTD. So perhaps "bad" is an inaccurate way to describe what I'm trying to get across. "Non-optimal," maybe? It's really late, and I'm babbling.
As far as I know, we still don't know what exactly causes IBD, so I don't think you can say with any certainty that diet doesn't cause it. But cats eating dry food seem a lot more prone to it than cats on canned food or balanced home-made diets (don't jump all over me for studies, this is strictly going on anecdotal evidence and personal observation), and the problem seems more likely to develop over time, i.e. older cats get it more frequently than young uns. Since a cat owner has no way of predicting whether a food sensitivity will develop, why not minimize the chances even further by feeding a food that doesn't seem as likely to aggravate this particular syndrome? It's not as if feeding high-protein canned food or a balanced home-made diet will be unhealthy for the cat. It's like telling someone, hey, if you eat a high-fat diet, you may nor may not put on lots of weight, which may or may not lead to heart disease later in life. Why don't you keep eating a high-fat diet and see what develops? The analogy isn't perfect because the occurence rate of heart disease is higher than the occurence rate of IBD in cats, but do you get the general sense of what I'm saying? It's sort of the same thing with soy: it may or many not lead to hyperT down the line, but why fuck with that shit if it's within your means to avoid it?
Again, my original comment on hyperT was mostly related to how soy elevates T4 levels in cats. I'll delete the two offending comments that suggest causation, because you're right, it's extremely sloppy, even for a snarky website written by a layperson. So I'll cop to one piece-of-shit comment on the website, but I stand by pretty much everything else I wrote. Let me know if you spot any more issues you'd like to duke out with me. This is excellent mental exercise. misshepeshu fucked around with this message at Oct 06, 2004 around 04:39 |
It is - I'm going to retract any comments about your website. While I may not agree with everything you say, you certainly have done the research to back it up. Not many people have read "Small Animal Clinical Nutrition". =) My initial response was very knee-jerk, because I've read a lot of sites claiming various things about animal health without information to support them. A brief scan of your web site made me think it was the same thing, and it is not. The article I cited about copper levels cited three AAFCO studies - I wasn't sure if those were the same ones you were mentioning or not. Either way, I'll agree with you that there's a problem if a food certified for growth causes birth defects - did they pull it off the shelves? If not, I'm with you - that's wrong. I don't think your science is totally off, but very few studies prove things in medicine, because of the large number of confounding factors. For example, the wet vs. dry food survey - was the composition of the food identicle except for the water content? Was there a difference in the cat owners or cats whose owners chose one food type vs. another? I'll admit, these are the kinds of things that are almost impossible to prove, as you'd need a group of cats who have had FLUTD and then vary their water intake while keeping the food constant. The evidence may point to water intake helping, but it's pretty weak right now, at least regarding idiopathic FLUTD.
Ancedotal evidence is always difficult to work with in situations like these. It's just not enough to make me recommend to all pet owners to change foods. As far as IBD goes, I can't argue that, in many cases, some sort of food allergy is the likely cause - it makes sense. The age part makes sense as well - either the cat is exposed to antigens more, something happens to make the gut "leaky" and let antigens through that can react with the antigen presenting cells, or the immune system becomes more "aggressive" with time. But without some kind of study, I'd need quite a bit of ancedotal evidence to prove that any particular food component is more or less immunogenic than another. Food swtiching improving the situation makes sense, but should work if a cat that eats wet food switches to a completely unrelated dry food as well. |
To be honest, I've only read the bits related to cats
Anyway, please understand that I generally view most "holistic" claims with great suspicion; in some ways I'm even more skeptical about these claims than I am about "mainstream" nutrition claims. I've written very scathingly about some of the bad science on the Feline Future website, for example (their explanation of what makes an amino acid "L" or "D" is quite hilariously wrong), and I do my best to debunk those damn "superfood" supplements when people write to the various e-mail lists I belong to asking about them.
Ahhh, I see. I mis-read you. Sorry. Anyway, results of AAFCO feeding trials are generally not published, I believe, which is why there's no citation or link given in that article. I doubt they were talking about the case study I typed up because the case study involved a food that had already passed the test and it didn't sound like the cats were involved in further food trials. I have no idea if the food was yanked, or if the manufacturer at least changed its formulation; since no names are ever named in these case studies and they never mention if the manufacturer was informed or if they took any action subsequently, it's hard to say what happens ultimately to the culprits behind these horror stories. I don't recall hearing about recalls on this issue, though, so I'm going to speculate wildly and guess that the food remained on the market until the manufacturer changed its formulation because they reckoned the average consumer wasn't going to notice a difference fast enough. I was dorky enough to start pulling random bags of Friskies and Purina off the grocery store shelves to see if any of them contained copper oxide after reading this study, but none of them did.
True. One of my pet peeves with all those studies that prove vegetarians are healthier than meat-eaters, for example, is that they never control only for meat-eating. The most telling study cited in "Effects of Diet on FLUTD", in my opinion, is the one in which they induced hematuria by feeding a high-magnesium dry food, then "cured" the hematuria when they added loads and loads of water to the same diet. But since I haven't read the original study, I don't know if the hematuria was secondary to urolithiasis, how long it took for the hematuria to be resolved after being fed the high-moisture food, etc. The study showing that prescription wet foods decrease FLUTD recurrences better than the same prescription food in dry form is also suggestive, but dry food is formulated very differently from wet, so you can't say moisture was the only factor controlled for. But you can say with some certainty that based on that study, wet food significantly decreased recurrences of idiopathic FLUTD compared to dry, though the exact mechanism isn't clear. To revisit a previous post you made about Purina DM:
What's the diabetes diet they feed people? Is it similar
to the traditional high-fiber diet that typify most feline diabetic
formulas? Anyway, DM (and now Hill's m/d) departs quite radically
from the high-fiber approach to diabetes management and instead made
their food relatively low in carbohydrates and very high protein.
(And full of soy, mraaaagh! Anyway, I've tweaked a little more with the site, removed the offending sentences about soy, and placed a disclaimer on the front page as to who the website is aimed at (very paranoid cat owners, essentially). Now it's up to my husband to upload the changed pages. EDIT TO ADD: Hey Khelmar, I'm seriously thinking of including the back-and-forth we've had in this thread on my website. It'll give the readers a perspective other than mine to look at. What do you think? Are you cool with that? misshepeshu fucked around with this message at Oct 06, 2004 around 23:34 |
. I
just don't have the time and energy to delve into the dog or exotics
sections. When it comes to dog nutrition, I mostly know what I've
learned through osmosis on various cat nutrition mailing lists from
people who own both. Reading up on feline nutrition is a very odd
hobby, and if my friends ever found out how excited I was to get,
say, the 1996 Iams Symposium through interlibrary loan, they'd think
I'm an even bigger dork they already do. But hey, if my husband can
pore with great interest on car manuals that go into great detail
about how they run, I don't see why I can't do the same with cats.
)
Their dry food is only about 13% calories from carbs, which is extremely
low for dry food, though their canned food isn't anything special
in terms of low-carb content. Hill's quickly followed suit, and m/d
is marketed for both "metabolic weight loss" (gag) and for
diabetes management. I always thought weight loss was an integral
part of diabetes therapy, anyway, for both cats and humans.