Please note: we are not vets and the piece below has been written from personal experience. If you suspect your cat has this disease - symptoms showing up as not eating and unhappy - then you should consult your vet immediately.

IBD can be very serious for cats. As the name suggests, it is usually caused by some kind of food intolerance which irritates their stomach and bowels. If not treated, the stomach and intestines can become swollen and cause the cat discomfort. In the end they stop eating and their condition deteriorates.

The problem is trying to identify what is causing this reaction. There is a lot of evidence to say it is caused by grains that are added to both dried and wet cat food. You can try to work this out by feeding your cat a strictly controlled variety of foods and seeing if one is tolerated. In our case our cat was quite ill and the first course of action decided by our vet was a course of steroids called Prednisone. 

The effects were amazing - within a day our cats discomfort had gone and her appetite was back.

When we had got her a year earlier she had been brought up a dry diet. I have had cats for many years and there was something that I just did not like about the dried food. A lot of vets recommended it and said it was good for their teeth. When I read more into it I discovered that this was not strictly true and that a paste can build up on their gums and there are many who say it is actually worse for the teeth. We decided to move onto a wet diet and slowly weaned our two kitten sisters onto it. Possibly it was this change that triggered the IBD six months later - I will never know.

Anyway, after the first course of Prednisone, which lasted for 10 days things had returned to normal. We continued using a wet cat food. All went well for 2 or 3 months then the IBD came back so off to the vets we went. This time we saw the senior partner who we had come to like and trust over the years. We decided together that he should operate and check the intestines for any other problems. This operation showed nothing other than swelling. He told us that he had another client with a similar problem and that a low dose of Prednisone had helped her cat lead a normal life. We decided to go with it even though it may have caused problems with her immune system and shorten her life.

After a couple of months we noticed that our cats hair had not regrown back properly after her operation and I surmised that the steroids may have something to do with it. Time to hit the internet. I discovered an ibd support group here and started reading about the work of Natascha Wilde and Lisa Pierson on raw diets. For many people it had helped their cats to return to a normal life.

It had to be tried. We decided to take things very slowly and had a very long planned taper off the Prednisone, lasting at least three months and then introduced some raw meat. Our cat who was ill took to it immediately but our other cat refused it. It was like our ibd cat knew it was good for her. Anyway, we persevered with the diet, heating it and semi cooking it at first and within a week or two they were both eating it with gusto.

This was all 2 and half years ago and so far we have been ibd free. Our vet is obviously happy for us and I think it true to say he is very impressed by both our cats health on a raw diet. He is a health professional and without the intitial prednisone our cat may have died.

We now use Instintcs 75% of the time and a component raw diet from here for the other 25%.

I do not want to give anyone in a similar position false hope - all I can say it has transformed the life of our cat. It is enjoyable to know that you are giving your pet the same care and attention to their diet as you do to your own. I would honestly say to anyone in this position to give it a go. You do not have to use our products. The component method is just as good - it is just that Instincts is easy to use and fits into a modern life.

If I was to start all over with two healthy cats I would never again buy processed pet food.