Best Cat Food

Underneath all of that fluffy cuteness, cats are carnivorous predators, which means that unlike humans or dogs, their bodies struggle to store up energy reserves. Instead, cats use their calories on hunting (or playing) and spend the rest of their day preserving their remaining energy by napping and lounging around.

This predator lifestyle is predicated upon a diet of highly nutritious foods—primarily proteins. Cats derive the majority of their dietary needs from protein sources, using essential amino acids to repair muscle and maintain their body’s digestive and waste systems.

Because of this, every meal your cat eats should contain a high quality protein as the main ingredient, and no meal should be less than a quarter protein on a dry matter basis. Ideally, half of your cat’s daily caloric intake should be from protein sources.

Quality vs quantity

Protein needs to be reared, fed, slaughtered, and processed—which makes it expensive. With cats’ protein needs being so high, this poses an issue for cat food manufacturers, who have to square nutrition with profitability. As a solution, many brands include several different protein sources in their formulas, ranging from human grade cuts to rendered and combined meat meals.

While low quality and rendered animal products aren’t necessarily harmful to your cat, they’re unlikely to offer a beneficial nutritional profile. Even if a meat by-product can claim a high nutrition count thanks to its concentrated nature, we’d venture to say that a real cut of whole meat beats the alternatives every time. 

To feed you cat the quality protein it needs while keeping costs manageable, look for products that:

• Use a whole meat or fish (i.e. the muscle or organ tissue of an animal) as the top one, two, or three ingredients in the recipe.
• Don’t list fats or plant-based proteins higher in the ingredients than animal proteins.
• Don’t use meat by-products or meals as anything more than a supplement to a primary source of whole protein.

As far as by-products and meat meals are concerned, the ideal situation is that your cat doesn’t eat them! If budget is a major factor, however, try to go for meat broths, or ingredients that specifically indicate the contents of any partial meat products (for example ‘chicken meal’ over generic ‘meal.’)

• Meat byproducts are most parts of an animal other than its muscle tissue—this can mean connective tissue, organs, and bones.
• Meal is the result of rendering slaughtered animal carcasases down to a concentrated form. 
• Meat-flavoring is just as it sounds: food that’s been flavored to taste like meat. The flavoring itself may contain meat traces, and the flavored ingredients may include meat meal, but neither counts as a whole meat product.

Domestic cats can take some energy from carbohydrates, but fats are by far the most efficient fuel for felines. Due to the ease with which they can process them, a diet where fats make up as much as 50 percent of calories counts as healthy, as far as cats are concerned.

Again, some fats are better than others. The kind of fat trimmings you’ll find on human grade meats are great, while those derived from dairy or plant products have a higher chance upsetting your cat’s digestive tract.

Essential fatty acids

Essential fatty acids are compounds that your cat is unable to synthesize by itself, meaning they need to be present in the food they eat. These fats help the absorption of vitamins, support cognitive function, and increase the body’s anti-inflammatory response.

Like humans, Omega-6 and Omega-3 fats count as essential fatty acids for cats, specifically, linoleic and arachidonic acid. DHA and EPA are other key fatty acids in your cat’s diet, though they’re not technically categorized as essential.

• Omega-3 can be found in fish oils (salmon and krill) and plant oils (flax, canola, and soybean.)
• Omega-6 can be found in poultry fat (chicken, turkey, duck, etc.)
• DHA and EPA can be found in fatty fish (salmon, tuna, trout, and anchovies.)

Cats can eat carbohydrates, but they probably shouldn’t. Domestic felines differ a little from their wild cousins, in that house cats may have evolved their metabolism in order to process energy from carbohydrates sources. However, our moggies remain obligate carnivores, meaning that protein and fat (and water) should provide all the nutrition they need.

That said, carbohydrates can be useful to cats as a source of fibre, and a study by Oregon State found that cats may see carbs as a tasty, ‘junk food’ style snack. When given a choice of food types, cats picked carbohydrates sources for an average 43 percent of their caloric intake.

So what should owners do? We’d recommend steering clear of any cat food that features carbohydrate as a major (top 5) ingredient, but not be too concerned if a recipe contains fibrous carbs, such as sweet potatoes or carrots, further down the ingredient list.

Fillers and grains

Carb-heavy cat foods are actually more commonplace than you might think. AAFCO guidelines inform most state’s minimum nutrition requirements, setting base fat and protein levels at 25 and 26 percent respectively. Even when accounting for moisture and ash content, this leaves a whole lot of legal room for carbohydrate ingredients. Of course, most brands don’t go that far, but it’s not unheard of to find cat foods with 25 percent carbs in terms of dry matter.

This is what’s known as ingredient stuffing, where cheap carb fillers such as wheat and cornmeal are used to bulk out a product, keeping cats full on less and raising the manufacturer’s profit margin.

The inclusion of carb-based fiber and macronutrients, as well as starches, doesn’t always mean ingredient stuffing. Many believe that a minor amount of complex carbs can replace the fiber cats lose from no longer consuming whole animals. Furthermore, most dry foods can’t be shaped and held together without the inclusion of some form of carbohydrate gelling agent.

The bottom line? Carb filler ingredients are contributing to a weight problem among the nation’s cats. Excess carbohydrate intake is linked to both feline obesity and diabetes, while feline diabetes remission has been associated with a switch to a low-carbohydrate diet.

Note: beware of seemingly low carbohydrate percentages that are actually a reflection of food’s high moisture content. Also note that many brands won’t actually list their carb content on the packet (guilty, much?)

If you’re looking for unlisted carbohydrates, simply add the protein, fat, fiber, moisture, and ash together and subtract from 100 for the leftover percentage. If you want to compare brands with different moisture contents, you’ll need to convert ‘as fed’ percentages into dry matter. Here’s an explainer from PetMD on how to make the conversion.

At the risk of repeating things, cats are happiest when sourcing all of their nutrition from animal products—that’s why the type and amount of protein and fat in their diet is critical.

However, unless your cat is hunting for their dinner, or if you’re supplying your cat with homemade or raw meals, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to access a sufficient amount of vitamins and minerals.

No matter how good a grocery store cat food is, it’s still a processed product, developed to be storable and extend its shelf life. This inevitably degrades the nutritional content of ingredients when compared to fresh food. Because of this, a majority of brands will add artificially derived vitamins and minerals to their formula.

When scanning cat food ingredients lists, lookout for these top priority nutrients and minerals:

Some chemical or mineral additives can sound scary, but they’re actually important amino acids that desaturate in meat when it’s processed. According to the AACFO, common beneficial amino acid additives include:

• Methionine helps to prevent urinary stones.
• Lysine supports immune response.
• Tryptophan enhances sleep function and serotonin production.
• Taurine has wide-ranging benefits, including vision and heart health.
• Arginine helps remove ammonia from the body.

While you’re more likely to find these kinds of additives in dry foods, they also sometimes appear in wet products. This shouldn’t be an issue, unless you feel that additives are being used to conceal low quality meat ingredients.

Remember: the rendering process serves to concentrate meat products, which can make them appear more nutritious, but this is because fresh meat contains water weight—not because it’s less healthy.

Arguably the most important part of a food package, the nutritional label tells you exactly what you will be putting into your cat’s body. The ingredient list may be lengthy, but we’ve sifted out the key elements that you should look for and avoid when it comes to feeding your cat.

Pet owners shouldn’t feel completely on their own when trying to navigate the cat food market. Guaranteed nutritional labels are designed to provide small assurances that your cat’s chosen product is both safe for them to eat, and that, at the minimum, it will meet the nutritional standards set by an accredited institution.

In the US, most cat food brands adhere to the American Association of Feed Control Officials (AAFCO) guidelines. The AAFCO doesn’t certify or endorse pet foods, but most states use AAFCO recommendations as the basis for their own legislation.

Knowing your cat food meets minimum legal health standards is a great start. To go further, look out for these other certification labels:

• Complete and Balanced indicates that cat food contains all basic required nutrients in minimally preferable ratios.
• USDA Organic badges let you know that a majority of ingredients are sourced from organic farms and aren’t genetically modified.
• MSC Blue Labels from the Marine Stewardship Council show fish products are sourced from sustainable fisheries.

If there’s only time to look for one certification label, however, make it the Nutritional Adequacy Statement. Usually found on the reverse of product packaging, AAFCO calls the adequacy statement “the most important part of a label,” as it describes the feline life stage and condition that a recipe has been developed to support.

Despite the fact that many owners value dry cat food for its convenience, long shelf life, and competitive price, it’s safe to say that dried products get a lot of hate online. We already know that dry food doesn’t meet cat’s hydration requirements, but why such a bad reputation?

Meat meals

Having a box of dried food in the cupboard as a backup or snack option is great. But the argument for dried foods as a regular fixture in your cat’s diet becomes less convincing when you take a close look at the ingredients list.

Let’s be clear: there are dried food manufacturers out there who go to great lengths to source the best meat ingredients and design the most beneficial recipes. But the majority of dry kibbles on the shelves are made with substandard produce—primarily, meat meals.

Meat meal is a meat concentrate, made from the offcuts and carcasses produced by slaughterhouses and animal processing plants. It’s not safe for human consumption, and if it’s a non-specific meal, may contain several species of animal in a single portion.

Meal tends to be low in actual meat muscle and high in more gruesome elements like organs, bones, blood, and even feathers. This contributes to a higher ash content (see below.) Because it’s pre-dried, it’s also lower in moisture and less digestible than a whole cut.

F(k)iller carbs

We covered ingredient stuffing earlier, but it’s worth pointing out that dried foods are the biggest offenders when it comes to filler ingredients. When food is dried and formed into pellets, it’s much easier to hide grains, soy, and other low-nutrient ingredients, which help to bulk out product weight.

Many dry food manufacturers argue that carbs aren’t directly harmful to your cat, provide a good source of fiber, and may be necessary to hold kibbles together. But while your cat might be able to digest them, they just don’t need them. Over time, high consumption of carbohydrates will raise your cat’s risk of developing chronic conditions and diseases such as diabetes and cancer.

Ash

Ash or ‘crude ash’ is the amount of inorganic material contained in a food product—so, minerals, salts, and non-tissue animal byproducts. If you burned a bag of dry food, removing all the proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, ash would be the stuff that’s left over. (This isn’t too far away from the process by which nutritional profiles are actually determined.)

Small amounts of ash in your cat’s food isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it may signal the presence of advantageous minerals like potassium and zinc. On the other hand, the biggest source of ash in dry food is usually meat meal, with a high-ash content suggesting that meals contain non-meat tissue animal products such as feathers and bones (yikes!)

‘Grain-free’ is maybe the biggest buzzword in pet food right now. While there’s some debate over the merits of a grain-free diet for dogs, labelling a cat food as grain-free is a way for manufacturers to signal their commitment to quality ingredients over profits.

Because wheat, corn, rice, oats, and barley are among the most common low-nutrition fillers in pet foods, removing them shows an intention to prioritise meat products in recipes. If a brand goes to the effort of formulating their meals without grain, the assumption is that other key ingredients will also have been sourced in a considerate way.

Grain-free ≠ healthy

However, taking the grain-free label as a synonym for nutrition without inspecting the ingredients list may be misguided. First off, grain-free doesn’t necessarily equal carb-free, as manufacturers may replace grains with other options such as sweet potatoes or carrots.

And, first and foremost,no matter what’s happening further down the ingredients list, cat food always needs to feature a whole protein as the primary ingredient to count as nutritionally viable.

Diabetes and obesity

Conscientious manufacturers are talking more about grains and cabs today because a higher number of our cats are overweight. While an indoor lifestyle is recommended by many vets for its advantages to cats’ wellbeing, indoor living combined with a poor quality diet is a recipe for obesity, diabetes, and related secondary conditions.

In cats, diabetes mellitus resembles type 2 diabetes in humans, which means it’s caused by both genetic predisposition and environmental factors. Beyond unchangeable characteristics like breed, obesity is a major environmental determinant of disease in cats, which in turn is driven by excesses or poorly derived calories and a lack of activity.

The good news is that research suggests that a high protein, low carbohydrate diet can dramatically improve symptoms of diabetes in cats. Some studies report diabetes remission rates exceeding 60 percent in cats receiving a combination of pharmacological and dietary treatment.

The key is to choose a diet for your cat that delivers the right nutrients with a lower calorific profile, and keep playtime sessions regular and varied!

A cat’s age is a reliable marker of its lifestyle, as well as its nutritional needs. Active, growing kittens will benefit from a different dietary profile than older moggies who may no longer be able to process proteins and fats as efficiently.

The AAFCO defines four main life stages that relate to a cat’s diet:

• Growth/Kitten
• All life stages
• Maintenance
• Gestation/Lactation

In most states, cat foods are required to list which stage a recipe best suits. So while a life stage nutritional adequacy claim won’t tell you about the quality of ingredients used to make the food, it will ensure that your cat is eating an appropriate ratio of food types.

For example, kittens often benefit from products high in fatty and folic acids, which support eye, brain and cell development. A balanced mix of fats and proteins will give them the energy needed for long days of play and fast growth.

As cats grow into adulthood they tend to require less fat, and less food in general. Senior cats can benefit from foods supplemented with calcium and vitamin E, as well as increased fatty acids to support their bone and immune strength.

Note: If you feel that your kitten, pregnant or senior cat would benefit from a more specific diet, it’s worth starting up a conversation with your vet. Gastrointestinal issues are common in cats, and may require a prescribed diet plan.

As owners will know, cats can throw up a lot! Whether it’s a hairball or eating something they shouldn’t have, an occasional isolated incident of stomach upset is nothing to worry about.

If vomiting or diarrhea become frequent, however, it may be a sign that an element of your cat’s diet is causing gastrointestinal irritation. Of all cat food allergies and intolerances, reactions to particular proteins and dairy are the most common, and can range from mild inflammation to wheezing, and long-term stomach issues.

If you think your cat may be suffering from a sensitivity, but can’t find the cause, feed them a food-sensitive formula made from a small selection of clearly identifiable ingredients. This should make it easier to identify which food type is causing the irritation.

Serious interlorances may require hydrolyzed meals prescribed by a veterinarian. Hydrolyzed proteins are pre-broken down to encourage digestion without triggering inflammation.