How to transition pets with kidney disease to therapeutic diets without a fight

Caitlyn Getty, DVM, PhD, DACVIM (Nutrition), explains how to counsel pet owners on switching pets with renal disease from standard over-the-counter foods to low-phosphorus therapeutic renal diets. She stresses that current diets may actively harm kidney patients, while prescription formulas provide controlled protein and targeted kidney support.

Below is the transcript, which has been edited for clarity.

dvm360: What are some tips for switching pets from a food that they like to something new?

Getty: It's really hard, right? Because pet owners, they really want to do what's best for the pet, and one of the things that they use to gage that is does the pet eat the food?

And so I think first you have to talk about the benefit of switching to the new food. Like for example, maybe it is renal disease, and maybe it's a cat or a dog, but the food that they're eating that's over the counter is maybe it's really high in phosphorus, right? Which we know is bad for renal disease, and they need to be on a therapeutic renal food because it's low in phosphorus. It's got the controlled, you know, protein levels. Maybe it has, you know, things like the AB+ Kidney Defense in there. Whereas the food that they're currently eating could actually be negative towards the dog or have have bad effects towards the animal.

And so, convincing them that the food is really what's going to be best for the animal is the first thing, and then I think having a big conversation about a slow transition is okay. Like, we don't have to make this transition in even a week. We can start with maybe a goal of two or three weeks, and if that's not going too quickly, maybe we can do this over a month or two, because in the end, getting them onto that beneficial nutrition is going to be really, really, really important. And if it takes a little bit longer to get there, that's okay because we really want them on that food, and it's going to be more detrimental to stay on the original food.

Caitlyn Getty, DVM, PhD, DACVIM (Nutrition), is a board-certified veterinary nutritionist and PhD Scientist working to improve the health and wellbeing of dogs and cats through nutrition.