Which cat food is really recommended?
If you look at how big the range of cat food is, a new cat owner can already start to think. Cat food is not only offered in the relevant zoo shops, you get a large selection of cat and also dog food in every supermarket. Of course, one wonders whether a cat food that you can buy for 0.25€ in the supermarket can be really good.
Natural cat food
All cats are predators and from this point of view you have to look at the diet of a cat. In the wild, the small predators eat all sorts of small mammals such as mice, rats or the like. Occasionally birds or eggs and also insects are on the menu.
The feed therefore consists essentially of a very high proportion of animal protein. However, the feed animals also absorb pre-digested cereals and plant components. According to this, the optimal cat food should also have a very high proportion of animal protein and a small proportion of vegetables and cereals.
What is in cat food that you can buy in the supermarket?
For this, we take a look at the ingredients list of a well-known branded cat food, which you can buy in any supermarket.
What immediately catches the eye is that only 4 chickenmeat are kept in the whole tin. That’s converted to the contents of the can of 400g whole 16g of chicken. And there we talk about cat food chicken with sauce. The rest of the content is therefore something else. And on the ingredients list you will find cereals and vegetable protein extracts. So you take cereals and soy or gluten as another filler, a total of 14. The rest is water. In addition, various vitamins and minerals are added, as the fillers do not contain them. A can of this food costs less than one euro. If you then deduct the packaging costs, you can calculate what the content is worth.
Cat food with a high meat content
As a comparison, here is the ingredients list of the Mjamjam cat food. What is immediately noticeable here is the very high meat content of the feed of over 90. The rest is vegetables and herbs. If we remember what the natural food of a cat contains, then this food composition comes very close there. Some vitamins and minerals are also added, which are destroyed during the processing or heating of the meat components. This food from Mjamjam is significantly more expensive than the cat food mentioned above. A 400g can costs around 2.00€. At Amazon, Mjamjam can buy tasting packages with different types of meat relatively cheaply.
Conclusion
A good cat food costs money, but for the health of your favorite, it should be the value of you. You don’t eat any cheap waste yourself. Our cats have been getting this high-quality food for some time and we could see that they are doing very well with it and also the fur looks very well groomed. What we have also found is that our cats need much less of this food than from a cheap one. This made it clear to us that the food has a much higher nutrient density and thus simply fills up longer. So at the end of the day, it’s not worth looking at every penny when it comes to food.
You can read what this looks like with dry food in this post. There is also the possibility to feed his cats according to the BARF method. We report on this in this article.
Tip
If you give a wet food, you should ideally only give as much as the cats eat immediately. Leftovers can be covered with a plastic wrap and stored in the refrigerator and offered again later. In the summer months this is especially important, as the food spoils quickly in the heat and it can also happen that flies lay their eggs on the feed.
Reading tip
Letzte Aktualisierung am 2021-01-12 / Affiliate Links / Bilder von der Amazon Product Advertising API