Alternatives to Standard Commercial Cat Foods

Most people select a standard store source diet for kittens, adults, or seniors but sometimes, other options will be selected to meet special needs or personal preference.

Home-Prepared Foods

The potential benefits of a home-prepared diet for cats include:

• Lower cooking temperatures, which result in less destruction of nutrients
• Greater control over raw ingredients; for example, one may use organic, all-vegetarian fed chickens and a mix of fresh, high-quality vegetable oils.

However, most people lack the time and knowledge to prepare a completely balanced fresh diet of consistent composition. This practice requires some specific ingredients be added to the typical meat-based diet or nutritional deficiency can result.

In nature, cats do not dissect out just the meat portion of the prey. Though it sounds yucky, they take in bones, entrails, skin and other components. The cut of meat we purchase at our butcher shop which contains mostly skeletal muscle and some fat is not a balanced dietary option for cats.

It is often difficult to mix the home diet components thoroughly enough to prevent picky cats from selecting only their favored component! Cats do not self-select a balanced diet.

Note: A growing number of natural foods that have recently entered the market offer many of the advantages of a dilligently prepared homemade diet, without the pitfalls. These products use less intense heat than most commercial cat foods, and include ingredients such as organ meats and a variety of fruits and vegetables. [We will have a more in-depth look at these products in future articles.]

Table Scraps

Avoid feeding scraps from the table! The cat may become fixated on the treats and put her nose up when regular dinner is offered. This can be very bad for the cat’s health if only a single food item is cherished. Serious nutritional disease can result when cats are fed exclusively single-source diets such as liver, or tuna.

Organic and Natural foods

Organic and “natural” foods are now more widely available, and are usually sold at a premium price. Some people wish to keep additives such as food colorants, texturizers, and artificial antioxidants to a minimum in their pet’s food, and a portion of these diets are free of some or all of these. Organic diets should be free of antibiotic and pesticide residues, and the meat and other components contained in it should all be of certified organic origin.

Note especially that natural antioxidant use will lead to a shorter shelf life when compared to a commercial diet containing artificial preservatives. Carefully check for a date of expiration on the bag when making your purchase to ensure freshness. Check the fine print so you can be assured this really is a natural product.

Low Calorie, “Lite” and Off-The-Shelf Diet Foods

For the cat that tends to obesity, these foods provide a source of nutrition that allows larger meal volumes to be offered compared with regular maintenance foods. They have lower caloric density which means each bite has less energy. A couch or window potato may not need much of the regular food to meet her energy needs. On regular rich food, this may leave her looking for more because she does not feel full.

Low calorie diets allow you to a greater volume without adding calories, so an “I’m full” feeling occurs after a meal. This can help prevent Kitty from pleading for second and third helpings.

Prescription Foods

These specially formulated diets are available only from your veterinarian.

Some examples of these diets are:

• Hypoallergenic diets: These are simple diets, with novel sources of protein and starch, and lack regular additives. Novel means new—foodstuffs that the cat has not been previously exposed to. Some even contain proteins that are already broken down into small pieces. This helps the gut absorb them without recognizing them as “foreign” and thus generating allergy reactions
• Diets for chronic diseases (heart, liver, kidney, digestive, diabetics) that help reduce the need for medications
• Weight loss formulations available by prescription are more calorie restricted than the off-the-shelf products.

Make sure that other cats in the household do not get access to these special diets since normal cats may experience harm. This is because of significant differences in the nutritional balance when compared with regular off-shelf products.  

Raw Diets

Raw diet feeding is popular among some—and there are scattered accounts of cats with chronic digestive problems improving markedly on raw diets—but for the same reason cooked home-made diets are generally not nutritionally complete and balanced, raw diets will also sometimes lead to specific nutritional deficiencies.

Of great concern is safe handling of raw diets. A recent survey showed all samples of available pre-frozen raw diets were contaminated with bacteria, some of them zoonotic. Zoonotic is just a fancy word that means these disease agents lead to illness in both animals and people . These raw diets are not at all suited for cats with immune system compromise (FIV, FeLV, chemotherapy, geriatrics, or the very young) since even normally harmless contaminants may lead to disease in these cats.

The contaminated raw diets are a risk to family members, especially those with AIDS, cancer and chronic illnesses if raw meats are not handled with scrupulous cleanliness. Parasites may also be contaminants of uncooked animal-source cat food, though this is more of an issue in some other countries.

Vegetarian/Vegan

This is not a great match for a pure natural carnivore! Extreme care must be exercise. Supplementation of key amino acids (arginine, taurine, methionine, tyrosine, lysine and cysteine), and extra vitamins (niacin, thiamine, cobalamin (B 12), pyridoxine (B 6), vitamins A and D) is necessary. Adequate levels of protein are difficult to achieve in vegetarian diets. The quality and digestibility of plant source proteins and fats is significantly different than those of animal source. The cat’s metabolism is set up to manage animal source feedstuffs exclusively.

A typical cat owner will not be qualified to formulate such a diet and if a commercial diet does not have AAFCO (Association of American Feed Control Officials) label indicating successful feeding trials, steer clear.

Cats lack salivary amylase which is an enzyme we people use to help pre-digest starches. Cats also have low levels of amylase and other sugar and carbohydrate enzymes in their gut, which means high carbohydrate diets are not well digested.

Meat diets provide all required feline essential fatty acids. Cats lack the machinery in their liver to process most plant-source fatty acids and this can lead to serious essential fatty acid deficiency if un-supplemented vegetarian diets are fed long-term. Arachidonic acid is a required fatty acid in cats (but not in dogs or people).

Cats are also unable to convert beta-carotene from plants into retinol, the active form of Vitamin A. Supplementation must be done with care, as cats are prone to overdose, with resulting steatitis (fat inflammation) and toxic liver effects. Cats also do not synthesize vitamin D (calictriol) from sunlight like we do, so the normal diet of animal tissue provides this key nutrient. Supplementing vitamin D is not without risk, as overdose will lead to high calcium.

[Update: A handful of vegan cat foods have come on the market in the last few years. Although anecdotally many cats do fine on it, there are also reports of cats on these formulations developing sudden and dramatic urinary blockages—in some cases dying from them, even when their owners scrupulously followed the manufacturer's directions, gave kitty plenty of moisture, went to the veterinarian regularly, and so forth. At least one vendor of vegan cat food has revised its earlier claim that cats can thrive on a vegan diet and is now recommending that cats have some meat in their diet. Among other things, it is becoming clear that it is difficult in a vegan diet to maintain balances of nurients that are essential to feline health. Furthermore, there have been no clinical studies evaluating the long term health consequences of putting cats on a vegan diet.

Theoretically it is possible to create a purely vegetarian diet that precisely mimics the nutritional profile of cats' natural meat-based diet, but that does not appear to be something that is currently within our grasp.]

Feeding Milk to Cats

During nursing, the enzymes that process lactose (milk sugar) in the gut are active in kittens. If kittens do not continue to receive milk, the enzyme production effectively “goes to sleep” and subsequent milk intake may lead to diarrhea. Milk is not a necessary part of the balanced feline diet.

Consult With Your Veterinarian

Selecting diets other than standard commercial preparations is a decision that should only be made with input from your veterinarian.

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