What is a Bland Diet for Pets?

I can tell you what it’s not!!!  Ok fine…  I’ll also tell you what it is. =)

First, where did this bland diet idea come from? It most definitely comes from humans who have had intestinal issues.

Humans are told to eat the BRAT diet. Bananas, rice, applesauce, and toast. Boring, bland, colorless food. Because it has no color it really has very very few nutrients, but it’s bulk. (AKA fiber or intestinal filler.) And humans do seem to find these foods easy to digest.

But what about for pets?

The first thing to keep in mind is this: Cats and dogs are not carbivores! So this BRAT diet thing does not work in dogs and especially not cats.

Recently, I’ve had a few clients go to the emergency room (ER)  and the ER staff suggested a bland diet. I definitely want to give these emergency room staff kudos for recommending real food and not simply their prescription crap. But let me tell you what they are recommending:

• Canned fat free chicken (in water) or boiled chicken without the skin
• Boiled hamburger (lean ideal)
• Low fat cottage cheese

 Carbohydrate source:

• Boiled white rice
• Baked potato no skin

So on a sensory level, my responses are:

Gross.

Grosser.

Tear up my guts.

Pure sugar bomb.

And yes… bland and dry!

Have you ever eaten boiled chicken? It’s horrid! It has no flavor. It’s drier than dry.  And all of the nutrition just got poured out in the broth. Same thing with boiled beef! Gross.

Let’s get some science in here, starting with the aforementioned data point that dogs and cats are carnivores. Not carbivores.

This matters because dogs and cats have a very, very limited ability to digest carbohydrates. Carbohydrates, white rice, or white potato, breakdown into simple sugars. These simple sugars are digested by amylase. Amylase is produced by the pancreas in cats and dogs. In humans, we also produce it in our saliva. Dogs and cats do not do this, because — fun fact —they don’t chew their food!

So if a cat or a dog is intestinally challenged, we want to capitalize on the part of its body that knows how to work well: its ability to digest protein. They were invented to eat protein! All the rest has been a modification by the pet food industry. Carbohydrates may be simple for humans to digest, but it takes intense amount of digestive power for a cat or a dog. Which is the reason why the two carbohydrates they recommended are NOs in my world for  a bland diet. (Have you read my rice post?)

But why am I against low-fat cottage cheese?  Cottage cheese comes from pasteurized milk, which means it was cooked. All nutrients were destroyed by the cooking process. It’s a dead food. So not only is it dead and has no nutrition, it has been altered by the Maillard reaction (super sciency: look up advanced glycation end product. This also affects pasteurized milk.) such that the protein and the fat are very difficult to digest, let alone access nutritionally. This cottage cheese is filled with difficult-to-digest lactose. So all of the dogs and cats in the world who are lactose intolerant and having intestinal issues? They’re going to have diarrhea, have aches and pains in their intestines and everything’s going to be worse.

Did you notice that the protein sources were listed as low fat? Why is that? What do they want low fat? It’s because of the misinformation about pancreatitis. Most veterinarians have forgotten what we learned in the first year of veterinary school which is this:  the primary job of the pancreas is to digest carbohydrates. This is why I was talking about amylase above. A very, very small function of the pancreas is to aid in digestion of fats (along with protein, cellulose, plant fiber, and more). While bile, via the gallbladder, is the primary method that cats and dogs digest fat! (Humans as well.) So unless the animal is having a gallbladder issue, low-fat is an inappropriate recommendation.

Most the time when animals with intestinal issues have visited the emergency room, the ER staff, logically, does a blood test. Their testing checks for pancreatic function through amylase, lipase, and perhaps PLI or CPL. The ER also tests for gallbladder function through the bilirubin test. So if these numbers are normal, why would we recommend foods that one should avoid with pancreatitis, when they do not have pancreatitis?

How about we recommend quality proteins with quality sources of fat? These are much easier for dogs and cats to digest. Skip the carbohydrates. And stop washing everything away with a bunch of water.

Before I forget to mention it, fat is how carnivores get energy. (Modern pet food forces them to get energy from low quality carbohydrates.)

Ground beef is great. Keep the fat. Whole chicken is fantastic. Keep the skin. And if you’ve read any of my posts anywhere over the last several years, you know raw (fermented) goat milk makes the world go around!

I want to see fat.

Let’s talk just a tiny bit more about that raw goat milk. Read the package. Before your emergency room vet freaks out about high fat content! Read the package. It’s 97% water. 2 to 3% protein. 2 to 3% fat. High water if anything. It contains easily digestible lactose, unlike what’s in regular cow milk. And it’s raw. Makes it even more digestible. Because it has the enzymes to digest the lactose in it. Unlike pasteurized milk in which those enzymes have been destroyed by cooking.

OK

Did I answer the question?

Full fat meat, one your pet isn’t allergic to. Chicken. Ground beef. And raw goat milk. That’s bland. And even better, it’s also healthy.