Discover how nutrition and environmental enrichment can enhance the health of senior pets.
At the 2025 Hill's Global Symposium, Becky Mullis, DVM, DACVIM (Nutrition), sat down with dvm360 to discuss the critical importance of a multimodal approach to senior pet care, emphasizing nutrition and enrichment. During the interview, Mullis emphasized the importance of optimized nutrition in managing age-related diseases. She also pointed out the significant benefit of incorporating fish oil directly into pet food, which helps ease caregiver burden by reducing the number of supplements clients need to administer.
Below is a full transcript of the video, edited lightly for clarity.
Becky Mullis, DVM, DACVIM (Nutrition): Hi, my name is Becky Mullis, and I'm a board-certified veterinary nutritionist. I've been working in our office in Switzerland for the past 3 years, and I am the senior manager of scientific affairs.
dvm360: Why do you think a multimodal approach is more effective than nutrition alone?
Mullis: For a lot of conditions, for our senior pets, nutrition can help manage that disease. It's not necessarily going to treat or eliminate that condition, but it really plays a role. Overall, nutrition is so important for patient health. But when you get to disease states, modifying that nutrition can help support them. We know there [are] a lot of advances in medical care [and] surgical care, so you're [often asking]: Can medication be used along with that? And sometimes [for] things like cognitive dysfunction, we now have [brain diet] and [joint diet] for that combination of cognitive dysfunction and joint disease; [however], we still may need, for example, environmental enrichment to really get the brain working. If you don't use it, you lose it—that type of phrase. So we need to make sure we're engaging these pets with environmental enrichment, or potentially walks, physiotherapy, or physical therapy, to get them moving—along with the fish oil. It's a combination of management options.
Fish oil is always a very popular topic. It's just really nice when it can be incorporated into the food that way. It makes it a lot easier for the pet owner. They're not having to add something on top of the food. [And] they may be giving medications, too, so then you get to that caregiver burden on how many things do we have to do. So it's really nice when it's already in the food, and then they don't have to worry about quality controls on the supplements, [or] how much to give. It's already part of the daily plan, and it's easy. You just feed [them the] meal, and it's ready to go.