How veterinary nutritionists use diet first to manage challenging GI cases

Caitlyn Getty, DVM, PhD, DACVIM (Nutrition), explains how nutrition can be a primary management strategy for gastrointestinal (GI) cases. She emphasizes that clinicians can choose among highly digestible, high-fiber, or low‑fat diets based on the individual patient. By supporting both the upper GI tract and the microbiome, appropriate nutrition can improve stool quality, enhance comfort, and address what pet owners care about most in day‑to‑day management.

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

dvm360: What is one practical shift you’d encourage clinicians to make in approaching GI cases and microbiome health?

Getty: It's to think about nutrition first as a management strategy for these GI cases, and the different kinds of nutrition strategies that you can look for. There's not just one food strategy that you can use. There's things like highly digestible. There's things like high fiber. There's things like low fat. So really, looking at your pet or…your patient and [figuring out] what's going on, what kind of food we can pick to help support that GI tract, and [whether] we can get these things under control.

One of the nice things with a lot of the foods that are out there, especially our GI line of foods, is that even if they're not a high-fiber food, they do all have the…active biome plus digestion in there…. It has that fiber blend in there to help support that microbiome. So even though you have a highly digestible food up front supporting things like the small intestine and the stomach, we're also supporting the microbiome and helping support good stool quality, which owners think is really important. It is really important to owners and the dog, and to their comfort, [to approach] the overall animal, including the microbiome, because it's all one big organism helping each other.

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