Feeding Your Cat: Know the Basics of Feline Nutrition - Pt 3

Let's ask ourselves the following question: How many cats become ill or die from these species-inappropriate diets yet the patient's diet is never even questioned as a possible cause of the illness or death? We cannot answer that question definitively but I have no doubt that the answer would be "many".

Do cats survive on these heavily (synthetically) supplemented plant-based diets? Yes, many of them do.

Do cats thrive on these diets? No, they do not.

Please pay special attention to the words *survive* versus *thrive* as there is a very big difference between the two states of health.

Fresh vs Highly Processed with Synthetic Supplements

There are two basic ways to meet our nutrient needs:

Eat fresh food with a short ingredient list - or at least one that does not resemble a science experiment full of long names that are hard to pronounce.

Eat highly processed foods that have had much of their nutrient content destroyed or altered, with food chemists 'fixing' the deficit with synthetic supplements. This type of unhealthy diet is consumed under the assumption that humans know exactly what was destroyed or altered during processing and what needs to be added back and in what form and amount.

Again, Man is simply not that smart.

While canned food is not 'fresh', per se, dry food undergoes a harsher processing. It has been cooked at very high temperatures for a long period of time. The extensive cooking required to remove most of the water from the food (70% moisture reduced to 5-10% moisture) significantly alters the biological value of the protein sources and damages other vital nutrients.

Humans then have to guess which nutrients – in what form and amounts – were destroyed by this cooking process and then try to add them back into the diet. Occasionally 'real food' is used instead of synthetic supplements but those long and hard-to-pronounce names on the ingredient list describe chemically synthesized nutrients.

Given that Man will never be as smart as nature – we will never know every detail of a cat’s normal prey - it is obvious that there is a risk when greed cause humans to stray so far from a cat’s natural diet.

We Are Feeding Cats Too Many Carbohydrates

Note: I have stopped using the term "grain-free" since it has become somewhat meaningless. Many companies (e.g., Blue Buffalo) tout that their products are "grain free" but then they just load up the food with high carbohydrate ingredients like potatoes and peas which are not grains but still contribute a significant carb load (and plant-based protein) to the food. The "grain-free" descriptive has become very misleading.

In their natural setting, cats—whose unique biology makes them true carnivores--would not consume the high level of carbohydrates (grains, potatoes, peas, etc.) that are in the dry foods (and some canned foods) that we routinely feed them. You would never see a wild cat chasing down a herd of biscuits running across the plains of Africa or dehydrating her mouse and topping it off with corn meal.

In the wild, your cat would be eating a high protein, high-moisture, meat/organ-based diet, with a moderate level of fat and with only approximately 1-2 percent of her diet consisting of carbohydrates. The average dry food contains 35-50 percent carbohydrate calories. Some of the cheaper dry foods contain even higher levels.

This is NOT the diet that Mother Nature intended for your cat to eat.

Many canned foods, on the other hand, contain approximately less than 10 percent carbohydrates.

Please note that not all canned foods are suitably low in carbohydrates. For instance, most of the Hill's Science Diet (over-the-counter) and the Hill's 'prescription' diets are very high in carbohydrates and are not foods that I would ever choose to feed.

Cats have no dietary need for carbohydrates and, more worrisome is the fact that a diet that is high in carbohydrates can be detrimental.