Pet Diets; The connection between diet, diabetes, and cancer
There are several diseases that we commonly associate with dietary health. Perhaps the most common of these is diabetes. Of course, most of us know that eating too much sugar causes diabetes. However, the truth behind diabetes and its link to cancer is a bit more complicated.
It is not only regular sugar that causes diabetes. Otherwise, cats would run very little risk. Furthermore, how is cancer linked to diabetes? The two diseases seem unrelated. Let us look at these and other connections as we understand the connection between diet, diabetes, and cancer.
The sugars
Humans and diabetes share a long history. Some studies suggest that we suffered from the condition as far back as the Neolithic period. Perhaps that explains our historically nonchalant attitude regarding diabetes.
It is common to hear someone refer to their diabetes as ‘a bit of blood sugar.’ But unfortunately, this doesn’t reflect the seriousness of the matter. On the contrary, such attitudes make it all the more concerning that our pets are also susceptible to diabetes.
Naturally rare
You won’t as commonly find a lion or a bear suffering from diabetes. There are two primary reasons. First, nature imposes pressures that force animals to remain active. Second, an animal’s natural diet provides what it needs, and there is little opportunity to gorge.
That highlights the problem we see in pets. They have little to no reason to be as active as they should, and their caloric intake surpasses necessity. Unsurprisingly, we see the same trends in humans more vulnerable to diabetes.
It seems that diabetes becomes a more pronounced and common health problem the less natural pressure on a person or animal.
So what causes diabetes?
Diabetes involves how the body processes glucose. The process relies on a hormone called insulin. Insulin comes from the pancreas, where it gets secreted into the bloodstream. By enabling sugar to enter your cells, insulin decreases the amount of sugar in your blood.
As the usable sugar levels drop, so too does the production of insulin. It is clear that insulin levels get directly impacted by glucose, so what is the function of glucose in this process?
Glucose is the sugar that provides your cells with energy. Your body gets glucose from your liver and through your diet.
In type 2 diabetes, your cells become resistant to insulin. That means that your cells struggle to absorb the sugar in your bloodstream and rather start to build up in your bloodstream. There is room for debate on why this happens, but your cells start to starve.
Diabetes in our pets
The process works the same way in our pets. But pets don’t eat sugary foods, so how do they get diabetes? Well, all life needs a mechanism to produce energy, most of which comes from carbohydrates.
The body breaks carbs down into glucose, which enters the bloodstream, and with the aid of insulin, provides cells with energy. Therefore animals don’t need raw sugar in their diet. Technically, the same counts for humans,
Indicating factors in pets:
- Pre-diabetes often precedes type 2 diabetes: A condition diagnosed and characterised as higher than normal blood sugar levels that do not yet meet the criteria for diabetes.
- Weight gain or weight loss: We commonly associate diabetes with obesity. However, in many cases, an animal can also lose weight due to type 2 diabetes. In addition, weight change is not obvious in some cases of type 2 diabetes.
- Symptoms: Common symptoms of type 2 diabetes in pets include lethargy, eating more than normal, increased thirst and urination, frequent infections, and slow healing sores.
A pet’s diet and diabetes
Naturally, your pet’s diet contributes to its susceptibility to diabetes. Of course, genetic predispositions are important when considering the risk to your pet. However, most studies indicate that poor diet causes most cases of type 2 diabetes in cats and dogs.
Extruded pet food; all kibble products
What are the primary dietary risk factors that may cause diabetes in pets? There are three distinct ways in which we can identify the problem. The first is the direct impact of kibble and other dried and extruded pet foods.
Extrusion is a process whereby food is exposed to extreme heat to produce a resilient product with a long shelf life. That alone should raise alarms, but in addition to the non-nutritive properties of the ‘long life’ products, there are perhaps more serious concerns.
Extrusion causes complex sugar strands to form when raw carbs, sugars, and amino acids combine under a high temperature. It is known as the Maillard Reaction and presents several health risks.
Primarily, the process produces any number of volatile particles. The nonenzymic reaction correlates with several conditions. These include diabetes mellitus, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and dialysis-related amyloidosis.
The indirect impact of kibble diets
Have you ever looked at kibble pet food and thought, ‘I wouldn’t mind a bit of kibble?’ Of course not, and the reason is more scientific than you may think. It is the same reason you never see your cat chewing on rocks or your dog nibble on bricks.*
We are programmed to understand what visual stimuli suggest a good meal. Humans seem to be more skilled at this than our pets. But what is it that we recognise? It isn’t chemistry or entirely analytical, but we know dry brown pellets are not real food.
We subconsciously identify the colours; bland brown does not suggest vitamins or nutritional value. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, we recognise that it is unnaturally dry. So what are these seemingly superficial observations saying?
One should present food in a natural, non-synthetic form. Rather, it is a matter of mammals’ anatomy and bodily functions like our cats and dogs. The more natural the food they eat, the more naturally their body can absorb and use nutrients.
Eating imbalanced and, albeit synthetic food often leads to unstable glucose levels. As we have seen, that is the precursor to diabetes gaining a foothold in the body.
*If your cat is eating rocks, it is a condition called pica. Pica may occur as a sign that your pet needs extra nutrients of some sort. Alternatively, if your dog is chewing on bricks, take the bricks away.
The consequence of missing out on proper nutrition
It may be the most crucial point regarding the link between kibble, other fad diets, and diabetes. The key is that what they miss in their diets causes the most serious problems and contributes to diseases like cancer and diabetes.
Numerous recent studies support the idea that raw foods, combined with meats prepared at low temperatures, reduce an animal’s risk of diabetes. There are several complex reasons for this. A more natural diet results in better health because the food works the way the body expects.
Diabetes and cancer
Now we come to the correlation between diabetes and cancer. Unfortunately, the link has roots in rigorous scientific research. It is not a freak occurrence or something that only happens in the rarest of cases.
Rather, the link between diabetes and cancer is certain, and many readers will have known a person with diabetes that also had cancer. So, reducing your risk of diabetes decreases your overall risk of cancer.
The precise mechanism is a rather specialist conversation. The primary medical link between diabetes and cancer is a biological link where DNA gets damaged due to diabetes. That creates the right conditions for cells to become cancerous.
If that were not bad enough, diabetes has a second way of encouraging cancer. That is by way of inflammation. However, while inflammation plays a role in the DNA damage mentioned above, it doesn’t stop there.
Inflammation also creates the ideal conditions for cancer to form. Indeed, recent studies explore the idea that inflammation may be necessary for cancer to form, at least to some degree. However, diabetes and inflammation have one more way to support cancer.
Inflammation gives cancer access to various mechanics of the immune system. Not looking a gift horse in the mouth, cancer quickly co-opts these mechanisms, integrating various immune cell functions.
In this case, researchers believe these stolen adaptations may be crucial to cancer cells and their ability to thrive and duplicate. Furthermore, these problems are the same in most mammals susceptible to cancer, including our pets.
Conclusion
Linking everything we have discussed may seem challenging, but all of this information converges on one critical factor. Diet. As diet links diabetes, cancer, and other diseases to each other, we start to realise the full extent of a poor diet’s impact on our pets.
On the grand scale, a healthy diet of fresh food served naturally by pet nutrition experts is perhaps the most important thing you can provide. By mitigating otherwise preventable diseases like diabetes and related cancer, you offer your pet companions the best chance at a long and happy life. It’s the very least one can do.
Did you know Vondis has been preparing special food for cancer patients for 15 years?
Nathaniel Duarte: “After our bulldog was diagnosed with Leukaemia, we decided to switch to an all-natural organic diet and Vondis was the perfect solution. Not only do they make healthy holistic food which is far superior to anything you can buy at pet stores/vets, they also offered to prepare us specially formulated cancer packs which were mostly vegetable based with less grains and carbohydrates to assist with our dog’s cancer treatment. The results have been ASTOUNDING, our sick little bulldog has never had such a healthy appetite – he literally wolfs down this food. I wish we had found Vondis sooner, our dogs would have been far healthier and happier!!!”
Under the direction of holistic vet Dr Barry Hindmarch, Vondis has been has been producing a customized home-prepared diet to deal with cancer. For more info, please email cindy@vondis.co.za.
