by Nicole Caruso

Created on: February 18, 2009

The world of cat food can be a dizzying one - there are hundreds of options, each claiming to be the best, the most natural, and the tastiest. Since none of us feed the ideal diet for cats (live rodents, birds, and insects), we all have to decide where our comfort level in feeding our pets exists on the 'cost' axis, the 'ease of feeding' axis, and the 'ingredients' axis. This guide will give you some tips on navigating the ingredient label on your cat's food in order to help your cat eat as well as possible.

The best food for your cats is the one that they eat and do well on. You cannot starve a cat into eating what you want them to; many cats will literally die before eating something they don't want. Diet certainly plays a part in health, but just like some humans live to be a hundred and ten while eating fatty foods, drinking whiskey, and smoking cigars while others die at seventy eating lean proteins, lots of veggies, drinking little and never smoking, some cats will live to be 20 on low-quality food while others will die at 10 on an ideal diet. Genetics play a part, but choosing a good cat food can help you stack the deck in your favor.

1) If you are feeding dry, look for source-specific meals to be in the top five ingredients. Meals just mean that the water has been removed from the meat before processing into a dry kibble. Since meat is around 70% water, if you see 'chicken' on a dry food instead of 'chicken meal', 70% of the weight of that ingredient has been lost in processing. By law, ingredients must be listed on labels by pre-processed weight - so there's a lot less 'chicken' in the dry food with 'chicken' instead of 'chicken meal'

2) Don't be fooled by ingredient splitting. Makers will be sneaky and use differently processed types of the same ingredient to lower its position on the top five. Adding all the types of corn together might mean that corn becomes the number one ingredient on that label, something manufacturers know won't sell. On the same note, if there are more grains than proteins in the top five, be wary - just because it's corn *and* rice doesn't mean it's any less grain-based and any less unnecessary for our pet carnivores.

3) Don't get sidetracked by fashionable ingredients. If you see 'pheasant' or 'quail eggs' in the ingredient list, it's usually halfway down, which mean that there is not a significant amount of that pricey ingredient in there. Manufacturers put tiny amount of luxurious or fashionable ingredients in cat foods to

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>