The Flintstones struggled to keep their pet cat indoors at night, but such attitudes are now nearly extinct like Smilodon itself. Now that cats spend most of their time indoors rather than foraging for wildlife in the backyard, their lifespans have significantly extended; older cats may require different nutritional needs than young felines and this could have had an effect on their current state.
“Diet may influence how cats adapt to age,” noted Emma Bermingham, Ph.D., Principal Scientist for We Are Ilume during her presentation at Petfood Forum on May 2 in Kansas City Missouri. This needs to be considered in future research on aging pets.
Studies conducted between 2022-2024 determined that 20% to 40% of cats now fall within the “old cat” classification, defined as those over 11 years of age, according to one author of a 2022 research paper. With growing age comes increasing problems related to inflammation – an effect known as inflammaging.
“As cats age, the more serious their conditions will become,” according to Leese.
Bermingham’s research team has conducted long-term studies with the same group of cats since 2007 to understand the long-term impacts of commercially available diets on their health. One group consumed canned diet, while others preferred extruded kibble.
At first, the cats in this ongoing study maintained similar bodyweights with only seasonal variations affecting them. But by age eight they began to differ drastically; dry kibble diet cats began outweighing those on wet canned diets while those consuming dry food continued putting on winter weight without losing it as quickly. Canned diet cats started dropping weight while their counterparts failed to lose it at that age.
“From eight years old on, metabolic or physiological changes begin to have significant ramifications on cat health,” according to she said.
Bermingham observed that to explain this disparity in weight, cats’ ability to digest fat increased during early life but then gradually declined with age; this decreased less over time when fed extruded diets; both age and diet affected protein digestion.
Retorted canned diet cats had higher fecal microbiomes that remained constant with age; on the other hand, dry-diet cats experienced more rapid changes to their gut microbiome related to amino acid and vitamin metabolism.
Bermingham noted that while her team observed differences in cat health associated with diet, future research must explore why dry and wet food react differently in cats’ bodies.