Submitted by Jeannie (not verified) on Mon, 2006-03-27 19:39.
As someone who has tried Evolution on my group of six inside kitties and experienced some troubles (3 UTIs in this group), I was interested in hearing this interview. I feel that for me to have any confidence in vegan cat foods, there needs to be an independent survey of households where these foods are being fed. This would be something like the Framingham Nurses Study which reveals that certain diets/exercise levels/vitamins seem to point to certain health outcomes--it is not a dietary study where you feed a caged colony of cats a certain type of food and see how many die, instead it's a study where you send a survey to all households that have purchased the food and you ask how things are going. Then you can statistically analyze what is going on in a population. None of the guests on the show were qualified to address this kind of knowledge gathering. There is no way that just meeting the dietary numerical requirements of protein, fat, ash, magnesium, etc. in a formulation can be adequate--the formulation has to be ground-truthed by real-life experience.
I think that Weissman was obviously being very careful regarding what his observations have been and this radio show was never going to be a place where he would reveal any of his doubts on the product.
No one addressed what I find to be a fundamental problem, which is: why do cats seem to develop problems eating Evolution when they do not develop problems eating regular "cruel" kibble. If Evolution is so much healthier, then why did my UTI problems disappear when I returned them to their ordinary diet? Why is Evolution not formulated so it has the same success rate as ordinary kibble? Is this a perceived problem or a real one? Is there, as someone else posted, a problem with consistency from batch to batch?
As someone who has tried Evolution on my group of six inside kitties and experienced some troubles (3 UTIs in this group), I was interested in hearing this interview. I feel that for me to have any confidence in vegan cat foods, there needs to be an independent survey of households where these foods are being fed. This would be something like the Framingham Nurses Study which reveals that certain diets/exercise levels/vitamins seem to point to certain health outcomes--it is not a dietary study where you feed a caged colony of cats a certain type of food and see how many die, instead it's a study where you send a survey to all households that have purchased the food and you ask how things are going. Then you can statistically analyze what is going on in a population. None of the guests on the show were qualified to address this kind of knowledge gathering. There is no way that just meeting the dietary numerical requirements of protein, fat, ash, magnesium, etc. in a formulation can be adequate--the formulation has to be ground-truthed by real-life experience.
I think that Weissman was obviously being very careful regarding what his observations have been and this radio show was never going to be a place where he would reveal any of his doubts on the product.
No one addressed what I find to be a fundamental problem, which is: why do cats seem to develop problems eating Evolution when they do not develop problems eating regular "cruel" kibble. If Evolution is so much healthier, then why did my UTI problems disappear when I returned them to their ordinary diet? Why is Evolution not formulated so it has the same success rate as ordinary kibble? Is this a perceived problem or a real one? Is there, as someone else posted, a problem with consistency from batch to batch?