Scientific Study on RAW/Homecooked/kibble

great results for cats! Our kitty supplements very healthy nutrition for herself often and we feed her canned/ raw/ kibble whatever she wants to eat diet. Kibble is her least favored food.
It is great to see that more research being done on raw feeding. Hopefully "Mcdonald diet" for animals while not over but will get serious dent soon. Specially with all those recalls going... I like seeing in local petstores " Made in USA" labels

 

I have searched high and low for this article, and cannot find it online anywhere. If anyone has any luck, please post a link. As a biologist, I just cannot buy into something from information posted in any blog. I need to see the original research. Get the big picture, so to speak.

 

biowicks, I was able to get the article through proquest using my school's web of science account... but it took a bit of work.

It's an interesting study - two things off the top of my head are a bit worrisome, one, the sample size of 9 cats is low, almost too low to really come up with anything concrete. They did show statistical significance for some of the variables, but with comparing means of only 9...

Two, the diets weren't the same. It's a scanned pdf, so I can't copy the ingredients, but the kibble diet was chicken based, and the raw/cooked were beef. There were also differences in the other ingredients as well - the cooked/raw were exactly the same, but the kibble was not. So, it's hard to tell if the differences are attributed just to the ingredients, or something else beyond.

The one thing I would be comfortable saying after reading this study is based on their preliminary results, cooking a raw diet doesn't seem to change it, versus feeding it uncooked (same conclusion the authors had).

I think it would have been a better study if they had just compared the raw versus the cooked. Adding the kibble, with the different ingredients, muddies things. But, agreed, research on this is a good step. But this study does have its flaws, which hopefully will be addressed in other studies. More samples (more kitties) and more similar diets...

 

Hi marymrumfelt!

The kibble had "chicken meal" as the first ingredient - they tested Natura food, so not quite as bad as Ol Roy - one of the researchers was funded from Natura, so maybe they wanted to test their best food? Or a new formula? Hard to know. I do wish they had posted percentages of all the ingredients for all three meals - good point.

I'm actually not sure if the exact recipes would make a difference, but it's just another variable that I wish they had controlled for. And to me, nine participants for a medical study still seems low - (their p values were less than or equal to 0.05 which will tell you about the chance) - but I think we both definitely agree that it's great that peer-reviewed research is starting to come out and that it will be interesting to see the repeatibility and expansion of this study. Thanks for posting about it - I would've missed it otherwise!

 

As a biologist, I can't put any faith in a study where N=9. And, cats are true carnivores, whereas dogs are not. Plus, lesser stool is due to no fiber (from plant products). I worry about spoilage, parasites, and other such nasties with a raw food diet. It is true that dogs and their relatives eat raw in the wild, but they don't have the lifespan of domesticated animals, and they all have parasites. I am sticking to my kibble for the time being, that being the only thing that firmed up my puppy's stool. She really needed the fiber. Once that's straightened out, i will probably add cooked homemade food to her kibble. I don't eat raw food because of the parasite and spoilage issue and I don't want that for my pet, either. But, as always, this is just my personal preference.