Dr. Kathleen McJunkin

So grain-free diets became very popular.

And that was kind of pretty much developed probably for marketing things.

And the nutritionists, I think, or not the nutritionists, but people wanted to get on board with making pet food and thought, oh, you know, do the pets really need these greens?

Well, no.

we found out basically that really they do and stuff because of this mistake that went on.

And now there might be some grain-free dyes out there that are okay to use.

What happened is, and I had a patient that was lost even with the help of cardiologist and found out later, I'm like, oh my goodness.

Um,

It was Blue Buffalo that made this grain-free diet.

And, you know, they did not do this on purpose, but they just didn't probably have – they didn't have a veterinary nutritionist on board to kind of –

figured this out maybe, and maybe they wouldn't have.

The problem ended up being too many peas and legumes in it, and so they were lacking something, but it affected the hearts.

Now, on another part, these grain-free diets with cats, strangely enough, which you really think cats don't eat, but they will eat grass in the well, and you'll see grass for cats in the stores that you can actually get and stuff, but

what I saw with some cats when they just switched over to this, cats can get, and dogs can get stones in the bladder, you know, and in the kidneys and stuff.

And due to these wonderful companies, we have special diets to avoid that.

Well, then, you know, they found out this grain-free diet.

Oh, we should try this.

And there were a couple of patients I had that ended up,

having problems with the stones again because they had switched out of that and a dog or not excuse me a cat that um had never had a problem before and they went on a grain-free diet all of a sudden had that problem with getting crystals in the bladder and then stones and such so um

we found out now we had to bring into our really address nutrition.