Fresh, wet or dry – what is the right cat diet? The right nutrition is the cornerstone for a long and healthy cat life. It varies from person to person whether a cat prefers to eat fresh, wet or dry food. Find out here what you should consider when feeding your floofy pet and whether there is THE one feed.
In general, it can be said that a cats diet should consist mainly of protein. About 20-35 % of the food should be protein (e.g. meat or fish) and 10-20 % fat. It is also important that vitamins, fibre and minerals are included.
Here is a list of what should be included in a good cat food:
• Protein: Proteins are made up of different amino acids. Cats need ten different amino acids. Cats can only poorly compensate for a deficiency. That's why it's also important that sick cats can eat again quickly, otherwise it can become life-threatening for them.
• Fats: Cats need certain unsaturated fatty acids that they cannot produce themselves. This means that these must be absorbed by it through food. Arachidonic acid, an important fatty acid needed, is found in heart, liver and poultry fat.
• Carbohydrates: Cats need relatively few carbohydrates and these few must already be broken down for cats to digest them. Rice and potatoes are particularly suitable.
• Vitamin A: Cats also only need vitamins in small quantities, but they are nevertheless indispensable for many metabolic processes. For example, cats cannot convert vitamin A from the beta-carotene contained in carrots. Cats are not capable of this synthesis step, they must absorb the vitamin A directly. It is found in animal tissues, especially liver and fish oils.
• Taurine: Taurine is a breakdown product of certain amino acids. It cannot be synthesised by cats themselves and must therefore be ingested with food such as meat or fish. A lack of taurine, as would happen, for example, through feeding a cat with dog foods can lead to blindness.
• Calcium: Cats also need calcium to build up their bones and must take it in through their food. Calcium is found in bones or cartilage.
• Phosphorus: Phosphorus is also important for healthy bones. However, too much phosphorus is harmful to a cat's kidneys. Especially for cats with kidney disease, it is therefore important to ensure a low phosphorus content in the diet. Meat contains a lot of phosphorus and little calcium, whereas bones contain a lot of calcium and little phosphorus.
• Dry food: Dry food has a long shelf life and is easy to portion. The dried and pressed pellets contain various ingredients that are vital for cats. In addition, there are different varieties that are adapted to specific needs such as old age, renal insufficiency or diet.
• Wet food: Wet food usually consists of meat or fish and various vegetables. It is available with more or less sauce, as jelly or paté. These are usually packaged in tins, sachets or trays.
• BARF: If you want to barf your cat, you have to prepare the food yourself from raw meat, vegetables, vitamins and minerals. An optimal balance is very important so that your cat is supplied with all vital nutrients that we mentoned above.
It is of course possible to BARF (bones and raw food) a cat, because in the wild it eats mainly raw meat, such as mice, birds or even insects.
So if you want to feed fresh food, the food should consist of raw meat, vegetables and supplements such as vitamins and minerals. Optimal coordination is important to ensure that the cat is supplied with all vital nutrients.
In barfing, the main ingredient is meat. The larger proportion is muscle meat (e.g. head meat, hearts, breast meat). However, offal such as liver, kidney, lung or rumen/poultry stomachs are also suitable. 1/3 of the meat should be fleshy bones in the form of wings, necks. If your cat cannot digest this amount, you can also resort to calcium in powder form such as eggshell powder or algae lime.
Add raw, pureed vegetables and fruit to the meat. Vegetables such as parsnip, carrot, courgette, cucumber are best suited here. The vegetables can simply be mixed with the meat.
If your cat is only indoors and cannot hunt for itself, you can also buy and feed mice and day-old chicks.
Taurine and BARF
In nature, cats meet their taurine needs with the help of their captured prey, because fresh blood is one of the best sources of taurine. But hearts are also rich in taurine. For example, you can feed chicken hearts raw several times a week.
But tuna, lamb or beef also contain taurine.
Green-lipped mussel powder can also be used as a food supplement, as it has a high natural taurine content. Simply mix into the meat in the specified quantity.
In nature, cats catch 6-12 mice per day. On average, every cat consumes about 70 mg of taurine per day. To prevent a deficiency, a food supplement with taurine is definitely a good idea if you decide to feed your cat.
When your cat is older or old, it needs a food that has a reduced energy content. As cats get older, they move less and therefore need different food than kittens.
Old cats also need special ingredients that stimulate the metabolism and slow down cell ageing.
Kidney disease is common in cats and affects about one in three cats over the age of 10. It is therefore even more important that you use a high-quality food, as this can prevent kidney failure.
However, when this disease occurs, your cat needs special food, which also contains less energy, i.e. also less protein, because the kidneys no longer work as well as they did in younger years. A special food for renal insufficiency relieves the cat's organs and supports them in their function.
The cat food should have a high meat content, but also vegetable ingredients.
The meat provides your pet with important proteins as well as nutrients such as vitamins and minerals contained therein. The plant components also serve to optimally cover the need for energy as well as nutrients.
High-quality cat foods with a high meat content are therefore provided with carbohydrate sources, vegetables and other ingredients. If you pay attention to a balanced composition of ingredients in cat food with a high meat content, you can prevent deficiency symptoms in your cat.
We believe that cheap cat food is not really good for the health of your cat. You can't expect a can of wet food that only costs a few cents to be the best quality. Finding really good cat food is difficult and it is also more expensive than canned food with cheap meat because of the high-quality food-grade meat used. For the well-being of your cat, it is better to buy a somewhat expensive food, but you do not have to feed as much, as high-quality food naturally contains more nutrients. Since the nutrient content is much higher, you also need to feed less than the usual amount of cheap food. And that reduces the "higher" price by up to half. Also, as cats get older, there may be lower vet costs because they stay healthier in the longer term with a healthy high-quality diet.
At Green Petfood, nutritionists and animal experts work purposefully on new products and product concepts. This allows us to combine scientific knowledge with innovation to develop high-quality cat food (and dog food too) with exceptional recipes.
We focus on keeping our environmental impact as low as possible. That’s why we pay special attention to carefully selected ingredients when sourcing our raw materials. By using alternative protein sources. We are also constantly optimising our production process and use efficient energy management to produce responsibly.
You want to know more about the quality of our products? Then read on here.
