What to feed diabetic with IBD

I have a diabetic who has been very difficult to regulate since diagnosis two years ago. He is being well cared for by our state vet school. They now think he may have IBD as an underlying problem. As a diabetic he cannot take steroids. He must eat novel proteins and we are beginning the search for something he will eat. Anyone have a cat with similar diagnosis and tips on feeding?

 

There are several of us here who have diabetic kitties with IBD. Mine is (or was) diabetic but his BG has gone down to normal levels after a couple weeks on insulin and no dry food. I tried many novel protein cat foods and the one my cat seems to like the most is duck. Natures Variety makes a high protein canned grain free duck with low carbs. They also have other novel protein sources. Not sure of the exact carb count though. Hills dd grain free canned makes a novel protein limited ingredient food but I don't think the carbs are really low. Budesonide is sometimes used in IBD cats who have diabetes in lieu of prednisone as the side effects and effects on glucose is supposedly milder. I am facing this now as my IBD cat is having some problems and I think my only choice will end up being the budesonide which may return him to a diabetic state. It's really difficult when they have both. The good news is there is more of a variety of novel protein limited ingredient foods now then there used to be.

 

If the IBD is relatively mild, sometimes just using a daily pre and probiotic can be sufficient. It takes a couple of weeks to be fully in effect, and like anything with our diabetic kitties, consistency is important.

 

Jones was diagnosed IBD before he was dx FD - the steroids caused the FD. He bounced around on several different foods. Right now he is on Wellness Grain Free Complete Chicken & Turkey. I did have some allergy testing done (you can see a link in my signature to his report), and hopefully I will be able to graduate him to some more "friendly" proteins. Which would be the lamb, venison, salmon, bison. My plan was to use the cooked recipe from the TC Feline website and add in the supplements. I have sourced the meat from Red Dog Blue Kat. They were kind enough to let me know the composition of there packages so I knew how much muscle meat/organ etc was in the packages. I actually did up one batch and it was a hit but we had some IBD flare up and I was scheduled to leave town, so I put that aside for now. http://tcfeline.com/ I originally was hoping to use the pre-mix but some of ingredients are Jonesy red list. I have also been looking at some canned options - there is several available (Welness, Instinct) but I found they all had at least 1 red listed ingredient.

ETA: He is also on a probiotic added to each meal. His situation was quite severe to start with.

 

Where's the red list? plz and ty

 

If you look in my signature you see Allergy Report - click on it and you will see the results I got for Jones. There is a green list (good items that promote healing), yellow items (don't harm but do not promote healing) and a red list (will do harm and may aggravate the IBD). I got it from groupon, easy to do - a little swab and brushing (or in Jones case I cut a bit of fur off) and within a week or so of sending I had the report emailed to me. Karen suggested it and now I know to look. What I have him on now is mostly in the yellow zone, so would like to get to some green zone proteins.

https://www.groupon.com/deals/immuneiq

ETA - the surprise was Tuna - I gave it to him all the time!

 

I just realized, I made it sound like there was a general red list, so sorry @Phoebes. Didn't mean to confuse.

 

No worries thank you!! Will look at that.

 

Thank you. We are starting with Hills M/D. We will see!