Have you thought about cat food? You go to the grocery store to pick up what you think the cat will eat in a week, and for some odd reason you start reading the label.
You look at the bookcase and are fascinated by all the names, many of which are new. The tuna tenderloin dinner consists of shrimp pasta, real salmon and sea fish in gravy, tuna and whitefish before continuing. Then you start looking at the ingredients and you are bothered by words like erythorbic acid, guar gum and locust bean gum, and suddenly you realize this is a whole new world in the land of cat food.
How can you be sure that you are feeding your cat an appropriate diet?
Well, in this country, pet food has to be made to meet certain dietary standards. We have the Food and Drug Administration and the United States Department of Agriculture responsible for food processing, and then we have the Association for Feed Control (AAFCO), which helps control the nutritional content of food. In addition to providing nutritional advice, AAFCO also conducts food testing to determine that certain foods meet all of the nutritional requirements necessary to maintain a healthy cat.
Our pet food manufacturers have a so-called quality control process that checks the health of ingredients before they enter pet food. In the food processing process, the cat food is checked for a certain moisture content, protein concentration and fat content, and an appropriate amount of ash. We even inspected our kitten’s food to make sure it remains nutritious throughout its shelf life.
From childhood, cats, adult cats, senior cats and cats with certain health problems can eat cat food at all stages of their lives. Cat food can help control hair, cat food can meet the needs of indoor cats for outdoor sports, but the taste of cat food is a combination of many things.
Cat food is processed via three different dry, wet and semi-moist methods, all of which start with many of the same ingredients but are processed in different ways.
It’s important to feed the cat food it likes so that it can absorb the nutrients it needs for a healthy life. Protein is one of the most important ingredients in cat life. Cats need protein, so it is difficult to digest carbohydrates. The irony is that mice are the perfect food for cats to eat, and cat food manufacturers try to balance the food to accommodate the nutritional balance of mice.
If your cat is like the cat who lives in my house, you will find that what they eat today does not necessarily mean they will eat tomorrow. In fact, in my family, if I give them in 10 minutes, they won’t eat “now” just like the food they like, they’ll eat it.
Cats like variants, but they are also picky eaters, I think this can be traced back to when they were treated like royalty.
Below is a brief list of some of the basic ingredients processed in cat food:
Digestion: Enzymatic liquefaction of animal tissue for herbs
Erythorbic Acid: Prevent the heat from destroying the color of food during the canning process
Guar gum, locust bean gum, corn starch modification: thickeners are added to bind food together
Propylene Glycol, Glycerine and Sorbitol: Used to control water in semi-moist foods
Ascorbic Acid: a natural preservative for vitamin C.
BHA and BHT: preservatives of artificial origin should be avoided
Recently we panicked about pet food, many of our beloved pets got sick and some sadly died. Despite all the precautions taken to provide our cats and dogs with good food, how do we know if they are safe? My advice is to read the label and buy the best food. I know there is no guarantee that food will not be contaminated.
However, home cooking is actually not recommended for cats because the cat’s body needs nutrition, so the meals cooked at home cannot meet almost all of the needs of cats.
For us humans, we must have faith in the constantly improving technology and research. Not only in terms of health, nutrition and daily food production, we must also rely on the belief and knowledge that if we can buy the best cat food, our cats will receive good nutrition and health.