Newbie with a good question! TIA

Hey everyone! My 6 year old Oedipus was recently diagnosed with diabetes and is on 1 unit of insulin. I was doing my research and found these boards super helpful and reassuring! So I was to say thank you to many of the ppl posting prior! My apologies in advance that this will be a long post. I just want to give as much information as possible since there are a lot of food post out there.

It has been a long month of research, learning and trying different foods (&$$$) I want to make sure that he is feeling well and staying stable. I have two brother cats and I want to feed them the same food because Oedipus will definitely eat his brother’s food. Plus, I want Samson to be healthy too.
I tried 10 different brands with a variety of types of high protein low carb foods ranging from shipping raw food from Canada, to going down the aisles of various pet stores with the handy dandy food list (I highland recommend!). The only food they both liked was the Fancy Feast Classics. I wasn’t a fan because I have read about the meat (or lack there of). So it was going okay for a couple of weeks but then Samson and Oedipus started throwing up this brown stuff after eating. I looked it up on previous boards, and read about the food recalls! I went to the food store today and returned the cans. The food they had been previous been eating before the diagnoses was Purina Pro Plan cans. Because I knew they both liked it, I decided to buy it again but only brought the ones with highest protein lowest carb on the food list. I haven’t found anything positive or negative about the food brand, besides the dry food and vet food being high in carbs.

So my question is, is it okay to feed food not on “highly recommended diabetes food list” all over the web as long as it’s high protein (>40) and low carb (<5)? Thank you in advance!! And yes, I do use glucose montering while changing his diet.

 

A good food is the one they will eat!

We try for 10% or less in the carbs as a way to help achieve remission. Jones ate the Rawz brand - almost no carbs but not on the list.

If you have something they will eat, contact the maker and see if they will provide the as feed values for you.

 

Merlin was very very picky with his food and I ran into this issue a lot, the fact that he loved anything seafood flavored but he could not eat it in large quantities was not helpful. But yes:

Like Tracey said, see if you can get the values. You could also mix it up, Merlin would sometimes get so picky I had no choice but to mix up some of his KD food with other food so he would eat it.

This is a learning process so keep looking around if you are not super happy with it, you don't have to figure it out this moment. Maybe you find something both kitties love and it wasn't on the lists for whatever reason like being a newer food or a less known brand.

Welcome and best wishes to you and your kitties