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 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: This is nutrition, right? 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, right? 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 looking at your patient and seeing what's going on and what kind of food can we pick to help support that GI tract, and see if 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 you know active biome plus digestion in there, which is really going to even if it's a highly digestible food, which means it's not a high fiber food. 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, and kind of approaching the overall animal, including the microbiome, because it's all you know 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 wellbeing of dogs and cats through nutrition.