Like humans, cats experience asthma as an allergic reaction that produces bronchial spasms, restricting airflow and causing sudden severe breathing difficulty. Not only diet, but house dust, pollen, household and environmental chemicals, stress and even kitty litter can trigger asthma in cats, so it's essential that your vet isolate your cat's triggers. If diet is one of them, there are steps you can take to eliminate it as a trigger.
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Elimination Diet
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Use an elimination diet, suggests the Merck Veterinary Manual. It's the only effective way to determine which foods or food ingredients are triggering your cat's asthma.
Examine and record the ingredients on all the labels of every food your cat is currently eating. Find a new food that has none of those ingredients. If even one of them is present, and your cat has an asthma attack after eating it, you won't know whether the old ingredient or something in the new food is the culprit.
Wean your cat onto an elimination diet by substituting increasing amounts of his new food for the old each day for a week until he is eating nothing but the new food. If your cat has no attacks on the new diet, the chances are good that something in his old diet was responsible.
Reintroduce foods or ingredients from his old diet one at a time. The Merck Manual says it can take as long as 10 days for your cat to develop an asthma reaction to the old ingredients, so feed each of them that long. If you cat has no attacks, remove that food or ingredient from the list of possible allergy triggers.
The most common food allergens for cats are fish, chicken, and beef. Reintroducing these first may speed the allergen identification process. Permanently eliminate the trigger foods from your cat's future diet.
Finding a Permanent Food
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An alternative to looking for a commercial food that won't trigger asthma in your cat is to prepare kitty's food yourself. Dr. Jean Hofve, DVM of Littlebigcat.com, recommends a diet that includes the following to make two days of meals for a 10-lb. cat:
Choose any one of the following cooked or raw proteins you know your cat will tolerate: 16 oz. of minced boneless white or dark chicken meat; 15 oz. of minced skinless white or 14 oz. of minced skinless dark turkey meat; 12 oz. of either 95 percent lean organic ground beef or minced rabbit; 8 oz. of ground lamb or bison; 8 oz. of minced beef, turkey or chicken heart.
Add a rounded tablespoon of bone meal; 1/2 each tsp. of salt and salt substitute; 1/4 of a quality human vitamin and mineral supplement tablet with choline, crushed; 1 digestive enzyme tablet, crushed; and 1 crushed 500 mg taurine tablet.
Add 1 tsp. of fish oil to each pound of lean meat like rabbit, poultry or bison. Feed your cat two or three meals a day. Refrigerate what you don't use.
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