It's not so much the brand of food... it's the quality of ingredients that go in it. There's a good amount of information on the following web page, if you scroll down to the section called PET NUTRITION CORNER.
http://www.marvistavet.com/html/body_oln_november_00.html
There's a link to help explain how pet food safety and quality are tested; there are also links that discuss ingredients and labeling. (It's pretty detailed, but I think there's a significant pro-pet-food-industry bias to portions of the articles.)
Generally, the quick way I scan pet food is as follows:
I look at the first 5 ingredients. I want the first ingredient to be meat; I want at least 3 of the first 5 ingredients listed to be meat.
I look for food that has no grain, if possible; no corn, no wheat, no soy. These are binders or fillers only. The digestive tract of cats is not adapted to extract any nutrition from these ingredients. If I must purchase a food with one of these ingredients, I look for it to not be listed as one of the first 5 ingredients.
I look for how the fat's listed. It's better to see "chicken fat" than "poultry fat"; it's better to see "beef fat" than "animal fat." The more specific the fat labeling, the better I feel about their quality control and consistency from batch to batch.
I try to feed both dry and wet food to my indoor kitties. My ferals outdoors get dry food and water only, since they're generally readily able to supplement their diet with an occasional mouse, snake, grasshopper, squirrel, rabbit, or bird.
There's a best-selling book that's a real eye-opener, for most folks, in terms of the pet food industry, what goes into pet food, and how it's tested for nutritional content. It's called Food Pets Die For: Shocking Facts About Pet Food, by Ann N. Martin.
I'm now supplementing the diet of my indoor cats by feeding them about 30-35% homemade raw food (ground whole chicken w/skin & bones, chicken livers, and fish oil). All but one of them will eat it pretty readily, and I separate out into small containers in the freezer. One container holds two days of food for them. It may not make a huge difference in their health, but they're getting a significant portion of their diet that's closer to the evolutionary diet of cats. I haven't switched them over completely, for two reasons. The first is because of the one holdout cat who won't eat anything but dry food. The second is because I'm scared of making an error that would result in a chronic long-term deficiency or excess in the diet.
Posted 3 years ago by anncetera2 #
