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10. Why Your Senior Pet Might Need More Protein, Not Less · Senior Pet Talk | for dogs + cats

• Amanda Steffen: You are listening to Senior Pet Talk, the show where we combine Western and Chinese medicine to give senior dog and cat parents the knowledge, the clarity, and the confidence to make sure that your pets' senior years are their best years yet. I'm Dr. Amanda Stefan. Let's get started. Hello, senior pet parent. Thank you for being here with me today. I want to talk to you today about a misconception that happens when we talk about senior pets. And oftentimes this can detriment our pets because we are restricting their protein. And in reality, a lot of times we actually need to be giving our seniors more protein. So I want to explain that in a little bit more detail so it makes sense and give you some insight on. How to calculate the right amount of protein for your pet and how to approach this with your veterinarian as well. So we make sure we're getting everything that they need. So for a long time, the conversation with older pets has always been: as they get older, we cut back on their protein to protect their kidneys. We know that 80% of cats over the age of 15 are gonna get chronic kidney disease. I believe it's 30 to 50% of cats over the age of 12 have kidney disease. So it's a large amount of cats that will progress to having kidney disease. My hope, if you have not heard about this yet, is there is a new product coming out in the next one to two years that is hoping to reverse the reason that cats specifically get kidney disease and could be a game changer in the world of kidney disease with cats. So That is called AIM or AIM. If you want to look into it a little bit more, I do have some information about that on my socials as well, but it's really interesting. But for a long time, we said, well, the kidneys have to help process protein, right? So if we're putting more work onto our kidneys, then we're causing worsening of this kidney damage, which is not wrong. However, we also know that muscle wasting. Is directly correlated to a shortened lifespan in our senior dogs and cats. So if we are doing things to decrease the amount of protein they have in their diet, we are often decreasing their muscle mass and we're often decreasing their lifespan, right? So there is not a one across the board answer for this right now. Unfortunately, there's a little bit of nuances with it, just like most things in medicine, but I want to make sure I give you all the facts and that way you can talk to your family vet about them and kind of decide what's best for your pet specifically. Okay. So a lot of our newer research shows that protein restriction is unnecessary in healthy senior dogs and cats. So we do not need to cut back on the amount of protein that they have as a senior. In fact, often they need more, typically up to 50% more. The things that we have found that help, especially in things like kidney disease, which is one of the main places that we talk about protein restriction, what we're learning is that it's more about other components with kidney disease, especially phosphorus restriction. That is going to matter more than the protein restriction itself. So Senior dogs lose about 15 to 25% of their muscle mass between the ages of seven and twelve. And that can fluctuate depending on when your pet is considered a senior. Go back to episode one if you don't know. And so that could be earlier in that five to six year range, you know, but typically between the ages of seven and twelve, we're gonna see up to twenty-five percent muscle mass loss. That is. An insane amount. And we know that muscle mass is extremely hard to build back on. This happens with people and it happens with animals. If we have muscle wasting, especially as a senior, it is really difficult to build that back up. It is not impossible. I have done it many times in my patients that I have. However, it is something that takes more time and a lot more. put into it. So if we can just work on maintaining their muscle mass and changing things earlier, then we may not have to come at it from behind. We may be in front of this. I think this to me is one of the reasons that I have such a strong opinion about knowing when your senior is considered a senior. And not hiding behind this. I don't want to think about it. I don't want my pet to be a senior. So I'm just gonna ignore it. There's nothing wrong with them. So I'm just gonna ignore it. The problem with that is that as that muscle mass loss happens, or what we call sarcopenia, this muscle wasting happens, we are getting behind every single day. And we are shortening their lifespan when we get behind on that. So Your senior pets, your senior dog and your senior cat have different nutritional needs as they get older. And knowing that upfront and changing their diet preemptively is going to substantially improve their muscle mass, their quality of life, and their overall lifespan. Okay. So this is one of the reasons that I say it is important to know when your pet is a senior, because it is so important for us to be able to proactively Change what we're feeding them, change what we're doing with them to help delay and prevent these types of things from happening. We know that as these guys get older, their body actually becomes less efficient at using protein to put it into the places that they need to. So senior dogs may need up to 50% more protein per kilogram than a young adult dog just to maintain the same amount of what we call a nitrogen balance in those muscles. So when I am trying to explain this, it does get a little difficult and it may be difficult to flip back and forth between kilograms and pounds. So I just want to precursor this by saying if you have any confusion about it, please feel free to send me a DM and I'd be more than happy to try and explain it a little bit more in depth to you. Again, I also will do this for you in my consultation program. So if that's ever something you're interested in. But senior dogs and senior cats may need up to 50% more protein in their diet to help improve or prevent that muscle loss that happens. Okay. So when we're talking about senior dogs, let's say that we have Missy, the chihuahua. Missy is 10 pounds. Missy at five years old, Missy needed to get about 2.2 grams per kilogram per day of food. Which is about one gram per pound per day, right? So she's 10 pounds. She needed to get about 10 grams of protein per day in her diet, right? When she is a senior, that's gonna bump up to about one and a half times as much. So it goes up between 2.75 and 3.3 grams for kig or 1.25 to 1.5 grams per pound per day. So essentially just think of it this way if you have a 10 pound dog, when they were an adult, they needed 10 grams of protein in theory blanket statement. Now that dog needs somewhere between 12.5 and 15 grams of protein per day. That is a pretty substantial jump. Okay. And it can be a lot of the reason that we see muscle wasting in senior pets for no other reason than their diet is inappropriate. Okay, so when we're talking about senior cats, it's a little bit different, right? Because we know our cats are strict carnivores. So they need a little bit more protein in their diet in general as adults. So our adult cats need about 5.5 grams per keg per day of protein as an adult. So in that like one to two to 10 to 12 year age range. And for a say 10-pound cat, that's gonna be probably 25 grams of protein per day that they need. When they're seniors, again, this may go up to potentially 50% more. So somewhere between six to eight point five grams per kilogram per day. So essentially this means that our 10-pound cat now actually needs somewhere between 27 and 39 grams of protein per day. So now you have to look at the bag of dog food or the bag of cat food. And figure out how many grams of protein is in that food and how much you feed. And then make sure that they're getting enough based on their weight and what their needs are. This is again why we often look at senior diets a little bit more. And senior doesn't always mean that they've done the right things, but hopefully they have done a better protein or an increased amount of protein or things like that. But this is why I really love for pet parents to be able to calculate this. Because I want you to be able to walk up to that bag of food and say, I know what this actually means and I know how to calculate this and I know how to extrapolate this. And buying a bag of cat or dog food doesn't scare me anymore. I'm not confused about what I'm looking at. This is just one component of it. There's a lot more in-depth about buying dog food and cat food, but this is one component that is really easy to try and figure out and know that your pet is getting enough protein. for their age. And this is one of the reasons that I think it's extremely important that we talk about feeding our senior pets appropriately and knowing when our pet is a senior, because if we're able to preemptively increase their protein, we're probably going to help fight against any of that muscle wasting that could be happening. Okay. So if you're not sure about whether your senior pet is getting enough protein, you can always book a discovery call with me. I'd be more than happy to chat with you a little bit more about that. And help to see whether we can do that calculation together specifically for your pet and get you some more information on whether your food is actually appropriate for your pet and their muscle needs or not. Okay. So we need to change the way that we look at this and know that we need to preemptively increase their protein levels unless we have a specific reason not to. That's not always across the board. If we do have patients that are more obese prone, we're definitely going to need to play with all of these numbers. Protein can transform into fat if it's not needed by the body. So there are some specific cases. But overall, in general, your pets need an increased amount of protein when it comes to their diet. So, current recommendations for senior dogs if we're feeding a dry food. Probably somewhere between 28 and 30% of protein on a dry matter basis. The HAFCO adult maintenance minimum is typically around 18%. So you gotta think about that's a substantial difference. Most bags of dog food that say for adult dogs are going to have a minimum requirement of 18% protein. And our seniors should be getting 28 to 30% protein. And you can't just jack up how much they're eating because that's going to make them fat, right? So we have to actually think about changing to a diet that has that 28 to 30% protein based on dry matter. Now, when we get to the concept of wet food or homemade foods or fresh diets, that gets a little more complicated because there is actually an equation that you have to do to figure out. the dry matter basis because the number that they're going to give you on that wet food is going to say a really high percentage. And that's based on the wet matter. So what we need is the dry matter. So there's a calculation that's involved with that. If you're in my program, I will help you do that calculation and we will get to the bottom of it. I have a lot of cat clients in my program and they feed wet food, which I think is great for cats, but it does take a little bit more Calculating to get all that figured out. But once you do it, I see the confidence in pet parents. Once they figure out how to read that label and calculate that protein level, they are unstoppable, man. They're like, yeah, you're not going to trick me anymore with those percentages. I know exactly how to calculate that the right way. And they're just so much more empowered. And my entire goal with my practice, my practice, Presence, my podcast, everything I put out into this world that is related to veterinary medicine is to empower pet parents to become amazing caregivers and a huge part of their pets care team. You are the most important piece of your pets care team. Veterinarians are not. I am not the most important part. You are the one who is with them every day. You are the one who's going to make those small tweaks at home. You are the one who's going to improve their quality of life the most. I'm going to see them once or twice a year, you know, depending on what sort of that clinic you go to. And I'm going to make the big changes and check on the big things, but like you're the one who's affecting their quality of life every single day. So I need you to understand these things. I need you not to just listen to me and know what I say. I need you to truly understand. Why I say the things that I say and be able to extrapolate them across to what your pet needs. That's why I'm so passionate about my program because I have created such confident, empowered pet parents on the other side of this who can look at their pet and notice small changes now. They feel so much more in tune with their pet. They feel like they know exactly what they need to do. They can go into their vet visits and say, I want to do this. And their vet may even say, I don't even know what that is. And they go, Yeah, but I do. So let's talk about it. I want to figure it out. It has been, God, it it brings my heart so much joy to have pet parents who are so empowered and can be the advocates for their pet. That's that's my whole purpose Okay, small tangent there, but let's move over to cats. Cats also lose up to 33% of their muscle mass between the ages of 10 and 15. And cats are going to have an even harder time absorbing and digesting protein efficiently as they age comparative to dogs. Okay. So again, with senior cats, we may need up to 50% more protein to slow or improve that muscle wasting. This is one of those situations where if you say my senior cat is losing a small amount of weight, that is not something we take lightly. Any small amount of weight loss in a senior cat is something I want to investigate. Are we losing it in muscle? Are we losing it in visceral fat on the abdomen? Are we losing it somewhere else because of a nerve degeneration disease or an endocrine or a metabolic disease or something like that? It is so important to get on top of muscle wasting in senior cats early and weight loss in senior cats early because it is just a devil to try and get back from. Not saying it can't happen. I have an amazing patient. His name is Fonzi. Fonzi came to me at about 14 years old. He had dropped back legs all the way down to the ground. He had so much laxity in his ligaments. He had a lot of muscle wasting. He honestly looked like he had no muscle in his back legs and his spine. And the picture transformation for him in a year's time with adding an acupuncture, muscle builders, and rehab therapy is unreal. It is just amazing to look at the difference between those two things because he is living so much happier of a life. He plays fetch now with his. Parents, he actually requests playing fetch multiple times a day. And he'll just sit upstairs with his toy and like yowl and wait on them to come up. And he they throw the toy and he goes and fetches it. It is the cutest thing I've ever seen. And he is so happy about it. That happened because of the things that we added in and because of helping with his muscle mass. So I truly believe that improving muscle in our senior pets can change their quality of life. And it is something I see every single day. I see so much muscle wasting. And I just think about what their life could be if we fix that. That's one of my missions. Okay. Have you ever left the vet with more questions than answers? And then you drive home and you go straight on to Google. Yeah, I hear that a lot. And honestly, it's exactly why I created my senior pet virtual consultations. Imagine we have 45 minutes where we go through everything: your pet's full history, their specific challenges, their daily life, no rushing. We're gonna cover nutrition, integrative options, whole modifications, and quality of life. And I send you a personalized plan after so that nothing slips through the cracks here. But don't just take my word for it. Chelsea called it a senior pup therapy session and said she felt so much better afterwards. Adiba got recommendations her own vet had never thought to suggest, and Denise said that the consult was incredibly informative and helpful, giving her many options to help her dog Loki feel better. This is the conversation that your senior pet deserves. And honestly, The one you deserve to. The link is in the description. I'd love to help you. It's also important to think about senior dogs and cats in this regard of like, it's not just that they need more protein. It's that they need an easier protein for the body to break down. So a lot of times we're looking at proteins when they come into the body, they're these big amino acids and they have to be broken down, right? That's why if pets have food allergies, it's usually to a meat or a protein because proteins are big and dense and hard for the body to break down. So we have this big, dense protein, and our senior patients have older kidneys, older GI tract, they're not able to break it down as easily, then we're just going to have a lot of waste of protein and not actually retaining what we need to. So a lot of times we actually have to change their protein source. Maybe they were on. beef their whole life and now they need to be on turkey or fish because it's easier for the body to break down. That's another important factor to think about is if we're not seeing the improvements that we need, maybe we need to switch proteins to something different. Maybe we need to add in some protein that is a little bit easier on their body. I had a virtual client who does a home cooked diet and she thought for sure she has enough protein in her diet because she home cooks it, right? And we found out that she didn't. So she started adding in a quail egg every other day to her pet's food. And she said that and some rehab exercises we talked about, her dog is doing so much better and just bounds, leaps and bounds of improvement noted. So there can be such simple things that we do that can drastically improve a pet's quality of life. And they don't cost that much money, right? A quail egg every other day. And doing these exercises once or twice a day costs her probably maybe seven dollars a week and you know, 30 minutes of her time. And her pet's quality of life has improved so much. So it's very simple things that we need to think about when we look at our senior pets. Muscle. Is also correlated to a lot of other things. So when we have a decrease in their muscle mass, we're gonna have a decrease in their mobility. Like I was talking about with Fonzie. He wasn't as active. He didn't want to do as much when he had that muscle wasting. He had laxity in his ligaments. So we can see some ligament issues with that. We can see incontinence with that. I see a lot of patients who lose core muscle strength that have more urinary or fecal incontinence that are going along with that. That can also be related to the sphincters, but it can also be related to muscle loss, right? We can see immune function issues with less muscle because they don't have as much reserve to play off of if anything happens with them, right? It also affects how well they bounce back from an illness or from a procedure. We know this is something called frailty. So essentially frailty is this like muscle wasting. You think of your Grandma as being frail, right? You look like you could probably go over and like if she got pushed slightly, she could break her hip. And that's because there's not a lot of great muscle surrounding that hip to help protect it and cushion it if anything were to happen, right? Same thing with dogs. The less muscle mass we have surrounding all of these ligaments and bones, the more frail they are. And the less resilient they are, the less they're able to bounce back. from things like illnesses or surgeries or anything like that. So it's extremely important to make sure that they have an appropriate amount of muscle mass for their resiliency, for their lifespan, just for for everything with these guys, right? Okay. I do want to talk about one exception. And I do always want to disclaim with you need to talk to your vet about these things before you just make changes to their diet. But confirmed kidney disease, Typically in stage two for cats is when we're going to adjust the protein. And even then, we still talk about this. It may not be a we're just feeding less food. It may be we are changing that protein quality or modifying that protein quality specifically to make it easier for the kidneys to function, right? The big thing with kidney diets is they're gonna decrease the phosphorus specifically. So a therapeutic Kidney diet has been shown to improve lifespan of cats. I know a cat that I work on now, she went on a kidney diet when she was in stage one. And she stayed in stage one for two years before she moved into stage two kidney disease because she was on that special kidney diet. So it is still important to make sure that we're following certain protocols. It doesn't have to be a kibble. There are therapeutic Diets now with home cooked. I know Winwood is one, Nine and Line is another. You know, they have like prescription specific diets that are for things like kidney disease. So there are other options that you can look into. You can also home formulate a diet with a veterinary nutritionist if that is the route that you want to go, preferably that are focused on their kidneys. So there are a lot of options with this, okay? I just want to say for the most part, restricting protein in a healthy senior just in case without any sort of a diagnosis of kidney disease or anything like that is not supported by any sort of evidence and can contribute to a shortened lifespan, to higher frailty levels, to a decreased immune function, to the decreased ability to bounce back, and all these other cascades of issues that happen. So It's really important to make sure that we are talking about that appropriate amount of protein for dogs and for cats. We are increasing that from that typical like one gram per keg up for cats. It's slightly higher than that. If you want the direct numbers on that or the calculation on that, you can definitely send me a DM and I would be more than happy to send you my video kind of describing that a little bit more. Again, it's also in program and I really recommend that program to help you truly understand your senior pet a little bit better. But I will always be here for free, giving you as much information as I can to help you because I understand everyone is at their own place. And I just appreciate that you're giving me time out of your day. So thank you for being here with me. Okay. If you hear my dog snoring, I promise it's not me. They're actually both sitting here beside me. And taking a really good snooze right now. So frailty from muscle loss is reversible. It is something we can improve with changing the diet, changing nutrition, changing muscle builders, adding those things in or rehab, those types of simple things. So I really want to make sure that's just reiterated here and you guys know that a combination of adequate protein and appropriate extras in physical therapy can really Change the game for your pet. It has changed the game for Fonsi. It has changed the game for Betty. Those are the two patients I was talking about earlier. It is specifically changing their life and their lifespan. And that's exactly what we want, right? Everyone wants their pet to live a longer life and a healthier life. So if that's what you're going for, I got you. I promise. Thank you for tuning in today. I really appreciate you giving me all of your time. I hope that you have a beautiful day. And I hope that this helps you to now have a little bit more knowledge when it comes to your senior dog or cat's protein requirements and being able to at least have that conversation with your veterinarian about what you think is necessary and noticing muscle loss and muscle wasting and really knowing that that is something we need to take into account when it comes to our senior pets because it's a big deal. Okay. You are doing a wonderful job with the information that you have. I promise. I am just here to give you more of it. Thank you for listening. Have a beautiful day. That's it for today. If this episode helped you, please leave a review or rate this podcast so we can get the word out to more pet parents who need to hear that they are doing a good job. And if you're interested in working more with me, you can find me on social media or at seniorpetconnection.com because we all need to stay connected. Remember that you are doing a great job with the information that you have in this moment. And I am just here to give you more of it. See you next week.