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Research has shown that nutrition can play a key role in extending the healthy life of dogs and cats—up to an average of another year or more—and delay the onset of many chronic diseases.
Maintaining lean body mass can impact longevity. Optimal body condition, together with sustained lean body mass, is important for overall health.
Lean body mass (LBM) includes skeletal muscle and organs, essentially everything except fat. It serves as an amino acid reservoir from which dogs and cats can build the proteins that are essential components of every cell, including immune cells, red blood cells and hormones.
With age, protein degradation often exceeds synthesis and this imbalance leads to progressive loss of LBM. This age-related loss of LBM, unrelated to disease, is called sarcopenia.
Sarcopenia in dogs and cats (and people) is associated with increased risk for mortality and other health problems.
Keeping LBM loss to a minimum can help cats and dogs better maintain health, and potentially live longer.
Insufficient dietary protein may contribute to loss of LBM. Further, inadequate protein intake and loss of LBM can compromise a pet’s immune system, leaving them at greater risk from infections and other stresses.
Historically, adequate protein requirements for dogs and cats have been calculated based on the amount of protein needed to maintain nitrogen balance. Yet multiple studies show that higher amounts of dietary protein are needed to maintain LBM.
While cats need only 1.5 grams of protein per kilogram body weight to maintain nitrogen balance (protein) they need over 5g protein/kg body weight to maintain LBM
Dogs also require about three times more protein to maintain protein/DNA ratios (an indicator of protein reserves) compared to that needed to maintain nitrogen balance, and old dogs need 50% more protein than young dogs regardless of the measure used.
