“This trend was clear and consistent and these results largely concur with previous, similar studies. A sizeable body of studies have been published within the last two years, exploring health outcomes of vegan diets in cats and dogs, and the environmental impacts of meat-based pet food. This evidence is remarkably consistent—nutritionally sound vegan diets produce health outcomes as good or better, and are associated with major environmental benefits.”

  • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
    35·
    1 year ago

    This is fascinating to me, in both ways. It goes against everything established in cat health science. So I’m erring on the side of “the study is shit” and from reading it there’s even more red flags than the one SUC homeopathic injection fluid study for renal problems that always gets cited:

    • Only 9% vegan diets.
    • The owners were found based on how they feed cats, instead of taking cats and putting them on a diet.
    • Most of the data is owner-reported. Frankly if you ever interacted with an arsehole that feeds their cat a vegan diet, you know they’d never ever report their cat being unwell, as that’d undermine their own world-view.
    • The whole study is funded by a pro-vegan “food awareness corporation” that.
    • (edit, found another red flag) The vegan population is statistically significantly more indoors-only, meaning they suffer fewer injuries in general so their vet needs and vet visits are going to be lower anyways, yet the resulting data is not normalized for this discrepancy (nevermind that I cannot find data about how one would have to normalize for this, so any real study would need to normalize this in the proband selection process).

    If it were true anyways, it’d be pretty mind-blowing big news. So that’s interesting. Like I said, fascinating either way. But from the looks of it, it just seems like a shit study. Couldn’t even do random selection and normalized reporting.

  • riodoro1@lemmy.world
    25·
    1 year ago

    Yeah… no.

    Im a vegetarian myself, I have a cat. I know humans can sustain themselves without meat especially when eating dairy and or supplemented plant products. I take my own health into my own hands. But from everything I’ve read cats definitely do need meat to survive. Mother nature didnt really take my worldview into account when designing cats. Therefore the only meat I buy is the food for my cat. He’s not a vegetarian and I respect that.

  • XTL@sopuli.xyz
    2·
    1 year ago

    I was just recently wondering if insects could be processed into healthy cat and dog food to avoid using larger meat sources.

    I’m not going to believe any plant based claims in a hurry, though that would be the dream