At some point in your pet's life, they're bound to experience some GI upset. And as their owner, it's your job to help them feel better. But what's the best approach? For GI upset, there is a specific diet veterinarians suggest that is supposedly meant to help their body recover. What is it? Well, in most cases of GI upset, veterinarians suggest a bland diet of white rice, cooked chicken breast, and a bit of pumpkin. But is this really the best diet for your sick pet?
This video is intended for pets that have mild GI upset, and is not a cure to conditions that need further treatment from your veterinarian. If symptoms do not improve in the next day or so of home treatment, please seek help from your vet full-width
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What if I told you that this bland diet could actually do more harm than good and that there's a way better recipe that you can feed instead? The role of a bland diet is to provide energy and nutrients to your pet while also preventing another GI flare-up. So let's take a look at this bland diet of chicken, white rice, and pumpkin and see why this recipe is so popular.
Cooked chicken breast is a cheap, lean meat that's not as rich in nutrients and fat as red meats are. And lean white meats are usually easy on our pet's gut. White rice is a bland and inexpensive energy source. And since it can bind water in the bowel, this is why it's suggested to feed when a pet has diarrhea. And pumpkin is added to the mix because of its soluble fiber, which helps bulk up the loose stool.
Okay, well, where's the problem with this bland diet exactly? Well, let's take a closer look. Starting with the rice. Rice may be able to pull water from the bowel to help stop the diarrhea, but it's not necessarily helping your pet's digestive tract recover. First of all, rice is an inappropriate food for carnivores. And additionally, it also ranks very high on the glycemic index, meaning that between the index scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being pure glucose, i.e. sugar, white rice ranks 72. This means when your pet eats rice, the rice metabolizes into sugar, which causes the blood sugar to spike. It's also noted in many studies that elevated blood glucose levels can cause inflammation in the body.
So if our pet's GI tract is already inflamed, why increase the inflammation? Okay, well, what about just pumpkin and chicken then? We're going in a better direction with pumpkin because it's very high in fiber, which is needed to help firm up the stool, and it's also higher in moisture. For a pet that's lost a lot of water while being sick, a high moisture meal is a must. But the problem is, pumpkin is actually higher on the glycemic index than rice is. Now, if you're in a pinch, pumpkin can be an okay addition to a bland recovery diet in small amounts. but there's actually a much better option than pumpkin, which I'll show you in a moment.
All right, well, the last ingredient is chicken. How could this be bad? It's meat after all. Okay, yes, this is the most species-appropriate food in this bland diet, but among all of the animal protein sources you could feed, chicken may actually be the worst one. First of all, when it comes to food related allergies, chicken is one of the top animal proteins on the allergic reaction list. This means if you feed your pet chicken, who happens to have a chicken allergy or intolerance, you could be making their situation much worse. Conventionally raised chicken are also very high in omega-6 fatty acids and very low in omega-3 fatty acids. This imbalance of fatty acids can also cause inflammation in the body. And again, we're trying to reduce inflammation. All right, if this popular bland meal isn't the best for GI upset, what is? Well, basically, a meal that not only stops the symptoms from occurring, but also helps the pet recover.
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