Vet101: Guide to Choosing Cat Food and Avoid Food Poisoning

Vet 101: The Ultimate Guide to Choosing Cat Food and Avoid Food Poisoning.

Choosing a cat food can be an difficult task, even for a veterinarian. Most foods on the market have little to do with the health and well being of your cat and everything to do with marketing and profits for the company making the food, so it can be hard to sift through all of the hype and get to the basics for cat nutrition.The important thing to keep in mind for your cat is that it is an obligate carnivore (must have a diet consisting of prey). This does not mean that it should eat meat alone. It means that your cat should naturally eat whole prey. Eating whole prey includes eating not just meat, but small bones, organs and the contents of most of the gastrointestinal tract of the prey.

Why not just meat? Meat is poor in most nutrients other than protein, and while protein is the major nutrient needed by cats, other nutrients such as calcium (bone), vitamins and minerals (GI tract, organs), and roughage (skin and hair or feathers). Trace nutrients and electrolytes are also found in parts of the prey that are not meat.Because of the need for all of these other nutrients, by-products are NOT a bad thing in foods. They provide essential nutrients that then don’t have to be added as synthetic compounds to create a balanced diet.

I try to choose food for cats by thinking of what they would naturally eat if they were catching prey. With that in mind, small mammals, rabbits, lizards, earthworms, insects, snakes and an occasional bird are what the menu should include. A cat’s natural diet is 60 to 72% protein and 2 to 4% carbohydrate with the balance as fat. The best we can do with non-prescription commercial diets is to feed foods that are similar to this, limiting our choices to poultry, and rabbit. We need some small mammal based diet to choose from, but none are currently available.

Most cats are lactose intolerant and milk can give them a stomach ache and diarrhea. It is also a common allergen.

• Find a diet that has as simple an ingredient list as possible. The best is poultry and/or rabbit and supplements to make the diet balanced. Fish and beef should be avoided. I avoid grains as they are high in carbohydrates and do not contribute any well digested protein in a cat’s diet. Grains are not inherently bad, just are not normal in a cat’s diet.
• Find a diet that is at an absolute minimum 35% protein from animal sources (not glutens) unless your cat has kidney failure (IRIS stage 4) (failure, not insufficiency). My recommendation is for 40 to 50% protein (dry matter) or higher if at all possible. Canned diets containing 10% (as fed) protein have around 40% protein on a dry matter basis (water is taken out of the equation). Canned foods are generally 75 to 80% water which dilutes the protein, resulting in an as fed percentage that is lower on the label than that seen on a dry food analysis because the dry food generally will have less than 10% water.
• Find a diet that does not have fruits and vegetables if possible. Cats don’t have the enzymes to digest them so they are only a source of fiber and food for bacteria in the colon. (See above)
• Cooked ground meat with added supplements (I recommend BalanceIT at https://secure.balanceit.com/tools/recipegenerator/) is an acceptable diet as long as the supplement is used exactly as recommended and the recipe generated for your cat is followed every time. Ground meat should never be fed raw. Bacteria from the surface have been mixed throughout the meat and it is a perfect environment for Salmonella, E. coli and Listeria to grow in.
• Partially cooked chunked meat can be fed using a recipe generated by BalanceIT. Cook the outside of the meat to kill bacteria on the outside of it by dropping it into boiling water for 2 minutes. It can then be added to supplements to make a safe partially raw diet. It can be chopped immediately before serving. Meats that are not consumed immediately after butchering are not safe to eat without cooking due to bacterial growth on the exposed surfaces, so I do not recommend feeding completely raw meat unless you are butchering it yourself.

Cats can and do get food poisoning and it can be life threatening. How to avoid food poisoning.