The Mystery of Cat Food Ingredients is Solved
Choosing the Right Cat Food is Important to Your Cat's Health
Mar 31, 2009
It's easy to get swamped by all of the choices of cat foods when walking down an aisle in the supermarket. The list of brand names as well as store brands of cat foods is enormous, and they all claim that they will offer cats that unique blend of ingredients to promote things like a healthy coat, clean teeth, or added energy. The thing that isn't always clear though, is what the brand is using as filler in order to take up space in the food selection, and exactly what some of those fillers actually mean. This is where knowledge about the products becomes very important.
Tricks Cat Food Brands Use
One of the biggest scams that some cat food companies use is flavoring. When selling a product, some cat food companies say that their particular blend of food is "chicken", but if you look closer, there may not actually be any chicken in the food. This is where flavoring comes into play, where when the fine print is examined, it is discovered that the food is actually chicken flavored. This isn't giving the feline friends everything that they are looking for, and while it may taste good in the moment, it doesn't promote good health.
Unhealthy Cat Food Ingredients
There are some really bad ingredients that find their way into cat food, and if the consumer isn't aware of exactly what this means, then it’s going to be brushed aside. The problem is that some of them are flat out gross, and could be very bad for a cat to eat in bulk.
- Chicken By-Product Meal -- This is the left over parts of the chicken that are ground up to be used as filler. This includes necks, feet, undeveloped eggs, and intestines. The bigger problem is that the by-products don't have to necessarily come from healthy animals.
- *Corn Gluten (Meal) -- Corn is often used as a filler to take up space because it is cheap. It however can cause allergies in cats, and owners may not even realize it. The better cat foods do not contain large amounts of corn.
- *Ash -- In a lot of wet cat-foods ash is used as a filler to help fill up a can of food. The ash is exactly what it sounds like; burnt animal remains that wouldn't be fit for human consumption, which are then mixed in with other ingredients to serve to cats. Always make sure to check out the ash content in a can of cat food.
- *Wheat – Wheat is another allergen that finds its way into cat foods, but which can cause health problems if it isn’t served up in extreme moderation.
The Worst Cat Food Ingredient
Animal Digest is an ingredient that appears in some foods, and which is about as gross as it gets when it comes to a filler. Most pet owners aren’t aware of what animal digest might be, and gloss over it, not thinking how terrible it could be for their pets. Animal digest is best defined as a cooked-down broth of unspecified parts of unspecified animals. The list is extensive as to which animals can be included, but some of them are goats, pigs, rats, horses, euthanized animals from shelters, supermarket waste, and road kill. A cat food with animal digest could be exactly that; a food made from cats.
The Keys to Spotting Bad Cat Foods
Always make sure to read the ingredients on the cat food before serving it up to the feline family members. If an ingredient is unidentifiable, take the time to write it down and do some research about it. A lot of pet food companies aren’t looking out for the cats of the world, and it is up to the owner to take the initiative. The information is out there, and the key is to not just believe the advertisements, but to actually do the research.
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