No standardized ‘senior’ diet exists for pets, a veterinarian notes

In this video, Brennen McKenzie, MA, MSc, VMD, director of veterinary medicine at Loyal, addresses the complexity senior pet nutrition. He explains that although there are many diets that are marketed for senior pets, currently, there is no standardized "senior" diet. Brennen notes that for now, maintaining a healthy, lean body condition remains the highest priority for maximizing health age, while emerging research on higher-protein and fresh-cooked diets shows promise but is not yet conclusive.

The following is a transcript of the video, lightly edited for clarity and cohesion:

McKenzie:Nutrition is complicated because there are a lot of diets that are marketed for senior pets, but we don't actually have an official [Association of American Feed Control Officials] (AAFCO) senior diet category. The reality is 1) we don't know exactly what the optimal nutrition is for aging dogs or aging cats in general, and 2) it's likely that there isn't one—that each individual is going to need a unique set of nutritional inputs to maximize their health and well-being.

So, I think nutrition is important, but I think it's often oversimplified. Right now, the most important thing is not excessive feeding—not overfeeding—maintaining a healthy, lean body weight, and that's key. I think there's some encouraging information suggesting that maybe higher protein diets may be beneficial in the future. I think there's some interesting but not yet conclusive information about some of the fresh-cooked diets.

I think that's an area where we're starting to take the knowledge that nutrition is important and add enough detail to it to give us things that we can actually do. But I think right now, there's still a lot of uncertainty.

The best advice that we have is feed to a healthy, lean body weight, and probably most cases of age-related disease will benefit from some essential fatty acid supplementation. That's about the only thing that I think we can say with confidence right now.