Grain-free cat food

Animal food market is quite a mystery, full of loopholes and inaccuracies. There is a vast array of cat foods available; however, choosing the right one without digging into the ingredients list is very difficult. Animal food producers often use catchwords that are supposed to increase the value of their products and make you buy them.

In this post I will take a good look at grain-free cat food. This will not be a list of the best grain-free cat foods but rather an attempt to overthrow a myth regarding the naming. So what is the story with the grain-free foods? Do they mean good quality and health for your animal?

Do cats eat grain? – grains in cat foods

More and more people are becoming aware that cats shouldn’t eat grains. Cats are carnivores and they do not need grains in their diet. Grains are relatively cheap so producers use the lack of knowledge of the animals’ owners and fill their products with wheat and other grains to produce at a low cost and sell at a high price. Unfortunately the poor victims here are our cats that get food unsuitable for their needs. Grains are full of carbs, which should not be a part of cat diet almost at all. They may cause diseases, obesity and make our cats unhappy. Very interesting is a common explanation given by the producers why cats should eat a bit of grains… well it is because cats eat mice and mice eat grains! Following this logic, cats need to eat grains to eat the mouse with its stomach content.
My question is: is mouse’s stomach bigger than the mouse itself and that is why the grains have to become the main component of cat food. And why the dry foods have high grain content while wet food made by the same producer has barely any? What is the producers’ explanation?

Grain-free food for a cat

The awareness of the consumers is growing, which is a good sign for the future of our animals. Unfortunately we are still getting fooled by marketing tricks and grain-free cat food is one of them. We buy grain-free food thinking it is good and it also looks more attractive on the shelf. However, the only way to ensure that we buy good food is to read the label and analyze the ingredients. First of all, if indeed there are no grains in the food what are they replaced with? Well most commonly grains are substituted with potatoes, soy, other legumes and beets. Unfortunately the catchy phrase “grain-free” is true but it often means that the grains were simply replaced with something non-grain, cheap and also equally unsuitable for cats. Looking at the products in our stores I can tell that this trick did not improve the quality of the cat food but only filled up the producers’ pockets.

From my experience I can tell that producers who make really high quality foods don’t put any such catchy phrases on their products. They don’t need to because they know their product is good and people who buy it read labels. I don’t know why but unfortunately the really good foods are rarely found in local stores. It is not because of the price as I have proven in my posts about dry foods and wet foods.

How to feed your cat?

If you found and started reading my blog you have done half of the work already. If you want to know how to feed cats, you are looking for good foods to make your cat happy, well-fed and healthy you should read a whole series of my posts:

• Feeding cats – what your cats shouldn’t eat
• Feeding cats – how to read labels – this post you should read very carefully to be able to analyze labels
• Feeding cats – when and how?
• List of cat foods – 10 dry foods worth knowing
  List of cat foods – 10 wet foods worth knowing
• Feeding a diabetic cat – I recommend this post for those of you who feed cats with veterinary foods.

Please read carefully and choose the right food, high quality and good for your cat, not just full of empty catch phrases. You need to become conscious consumers that care about health of your animals and please do share your knowledge!