Sick cat, raw food (part 1 of 3)

When I adopted the Tweeb as a companion to Shadow (my other black cat), there was no reason to think that she had renal failure--a slowly progressive disease that is fairly common amongst elderly cats. Now, I knew she was old, as she'd been in "foster care" for six years. But she was healthy, for all her physical shortcomings--she has had no less than five broken bones in her little tough life, and most of them healed at odd angles, giving her the appearance of a Cubists' cat.

I'd been feeding Shadow a raw diet. Shadow was doing incredibly well on it, growing in leaps and bounds, and miraculously not getting fat despite my studio apartment being barely big enough for the two of us. The Tweeb took to raw instantly, too, much to my relief, chowing down enthusiastically on her bloody morass of ground chicken and organ meat.

But she was still drinking water.

That was the key: had she remained on her kibble diet, I would have thought nothing of the Tweeb drinking water, and would never have brought her in for the tests. Had she remained on kibble, I would not have realized that something was wrong until much, much later--possibly too late, when the sole choice remaining to me was not if euthanasia, but when.

Now, two years post-diagnosis, the Tweeb is doing quite well. She is energetic--perhaps even more so than Shadow, trotting after us when we go to the kitchen in hopes of begging a morsel out of us, and skittering through the apartment in a bout of the cat-crazies--and her appetite is undiminished. Far from losing weight, she's actually gained a significant amount of muscle and fat (not so much as to be anywhere near obese, but she's no longer the skin-and-bone kitty she used to be). She's quite personable, too, loving nothing better than to curl up on me when I sleep. You'd be hard-pressed to believe that she has renal failure, unless you were at the vet's with us.

I do not attribute this entirely to the raw food. Renal failure progresses differently in every cat, and it could simply be that she had the fortune to get the long-term variety. At the same time, though, it's hard not to believe that a diet of easily-synthesized protein, minimal carbohydrates, and plenty of water (in the form of meat and canned food) has nothing to do with her good health. I realize that the disease is progressive--that eventually we will have to give her more intensive care, along the lines of subcutaneous fluids and medications, and may even have to make that hardest of decisions concerning a rainbow bridge--but for now her renal failure seems to have been beaten into a sort of remission.

Next: the Great Protein Debate

Processing power

The nice thing about writing on eating habits is that the English language is relatively unimaginative towards food: a raw diet is one in which you eat nothing but raw or only partially-cooked foods (heating food above 120 F is not allowed, under the theory that higher temperatures "destroy" enzymes within the food that allow you to better digest and use it. Macrobiotics is much the same, in that the belief is that processing a food in any way beyond cooking (what you would normally do at home) also tampers with the "essential" vitamins and somehow destroys the nutritive value of the food.

There are, as per usual, truths and untruths to this belief. On the one hand, it is known that some vitamins, vitamin C and folate amongst them, are inactivated by heat, and that many proteins are denatured when exposed to high temperatures.

Let's address the protein issue a bit further: proteins are essentially like a ball of tangled yarn. The analogy of dumbbells, joined end-to-end, which I used earlier to describe them, is still true, but rather than one long thread, they snake back and forth, in and out--like a ball of yarn. If you apply heat to them, they may unwind, and look like a long thin thread, but--and this is critical--the order with which they are arranged remains the same (if you have access to a protein lab, you can try this with serum, 8 M urea, and a circular dichroism spectrometer). But it is how the protein is coiled that gives it the specific properties, and furthermore, whether it remains coiled depends on things other than merely heat--the acidity of the environment, for instance, or the presence of salts and sugars. If you consider how food is eaten--seasoned, flavored to taste, chewed, swallowed--even the most raw diet is going to end up denaturing something.

The issue with "killing" the vitamins, is a more valid reason to eat raw food (though, as we shall see, it does not mean that you should switch your oven for a dehydrator). Vitamins, especially the more complex ones, are sensitive to heat, and many of the fatty acids that are touted today as being good for you are also highly susceptible to oxygenation, which turns them rancid.

What is oft forgotten about a raw diet, in the midst of the frenzy about feeling good and being healthy, is that the only reason such things are possible is because our food supply is reasonably safe--and that presupposes that random spinach and tomato contaminations are indeed random and not a sign that our food safety program requires a massive overhaul. There is some speculation as to whether cooking "evolved"--a hominid stumbling across a charred carcass and finding out that burned flesh is actually not that bad--or was invented, but either way, the point remains that humans have been cooking their food for at least 10,000 years, when the first civilizations arose. You don't stick with a fad that's not useful, and killing dangerous germs on your food is infinitely useful.

However, there is one thing that these diets get right: processed food isn't good for you. Making my own lentil soup allows me to tweak the flavors so that I get to taste what I like. Opening a can of lentil soup, on the other hand, means that I have bought into what a chef ten-thousand miles away, has decided I should like, and has added salt, sugar, and flavorings, accordingly. Processed foods are often stripped of their fiber, flavored with "things", preserved with "other things", and even colored and gussied up to look, if you think about it, nothing like food. I'm not really opposed to chemicals in our food--some of them are inevitable, after all--but it's probably better for you to eat less of them. It's the addition of fats, sugars, and salt, and the removal of fiber and vitamins that makes processed food unhealthy.

Or maybe we just need healthier palettes. A raw diet, like any other diet, is what you make of it. If you do your research, and follow good food safety rules, then odds are you won't make the New England Journal of Medicine under "Bizarre cases". I once considered going on a raw diet, and went so far as to purchase a cookbook (using my Borders Cash Back rewards). It was after a failed attempt at making nut milk that I decided that maybe raw is a bit more difficult than it seemed.