Discovering the best diet for cats so they achieve optimum health may be challenging for some people. So I will try to explain, not only what the best diet for cats is, but also my reasoning behind this claim.
The Best Diet For Cats
Without any doubt, this is the one they evolved on. Cats have been on this planet, doing their thing, for a very long time. In contrast, our modern way of caring for cats is only a few decades old.
Which have they adapted to, do you think?
The modern cat food industry is less than 100 years old. Prior to that, cats fed themselves, for the most part, even while they lived with us. Or they were given table scraps. Which would have been far healthier than the modern table scraps, which often consist of junk food.
The aggressive push with the modern commercial cat food is less than the 100 years. It started about 30 or 40 years ago, somewhere in the 1960s or 70s.
What Started The Commercial Cat Food Industry?
After the last world war, things changed dramatically. Women went out to work. There was less time to devote to everyday household duties. And there was more money.
The food industries, amongst others, exploited this, coming up with easy ways to feed everyone. Easy didn’t mean best. It meant profit for the industries. Which most often translates as worse as far as nutrition goes.
The animal food industry came after it was found that the human food industry was highly profitable.
Advertising had no limits and is still a very real cause for concern. The few laws that exist for animals are poorly upheld and expensive to challenge. It seems, sadly, that people still regard animals as lesser, unimportant beings.
Why Is Commercial Cat Food So Poor?
No-one seems to understand cats. Especially those who should – the cat food industry and the vets.
Cats are obligate carnivores. That means they MUST have a high meat diet. It also means they can’t utilise plant based food. They have no need to.
In addition, cats are fussy eaters for a reason – they only thrive on very fresh food. In the wild, they kill and eat immediately. They don’t bury their kill, as dogs may. They don’t eat carrion, as dogs do.
Check out the ingredients on the packet of cat food you feed your cat. It will list many ingredients of plant based foods, including isolated foods, which are an additional hazard.
The little, if any, animal products, will be the very cheap meats unsuitable to the much more lucrative human food industry. They are often rejects. They may be by-products, which is processed anything from road kill to euthanised pets and laboratory animals to diseased or dead farm animals.
Freshness is never an issue.
Add in all the chemicals to fool cats to eat the food, to colour, to preserve, and you have a real disaster waiting to happen.
The Best Diet For Cats
This needs to mimic that of their wild cousins – ie, raw meat, bones and organs, very fresh.
Holistic animal practitioners and vets embrace this for the very fact that their charges immensely benefit by this alone. Without doing anything else.
Certainly, the more serious and the more established problems need an extra helping hand. But the diet alone will support optimum health in cats. It raises the immune system back to where it belongs. Problems disappear as if by magic.
Getting it right, getting it in balance needs knowledgeable help.
Getting your junk fed cat to adapt to real food can also be a process that needs help and support. It isn’t always straightforward.
Discover the best diet for cats that supports optimum health.
