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The first ingredient listed is very important
The first ingredient will automatically tell you if that particular brand is serious about feeding your cat healthy, natural ingredients. Cats are carnivores; they need real meat in their diets as a protein source. When you think of outdoor cats hunting for their own food, what do you think of? They are hunting mice, birds, and other small animals. These food sources contain real meat, obviously, and not meat substitutes. The first ingredient should contain a real meat source: chicken, turkey, etc. Anything with the word by-product should be avoided. There are horror stories out there about what the word by-product could actually mean, but I dont want to scare or gross you out.
How many grain products are listed in the first five ingredients?
Ok, so you looked at the first ingredient and turns out, it is legit. It is a quality meat source. So now what you want to do is look at the following four ingredients so you can have a good understanding of the top five ingredients used in that particular cat food. You continue looking at the ingredients and are seeing words like chicken liver or deboned turkey. This is good, something that might be worth buying.
However, if you are looking at the ingredients and words like corn gluten meal or rice start appearing, red flags should be popping up. These are grain based ingredients and they are really hard for a cat to digest. Essentially, they serve no purpose for a cat. A lot of the time, they are there for financial reasons. It is cheaper to manufacture cat food with cheap substitutes like grain, rather than having the real stuff instead.
Along with these two key steps, a good cat food nutritional comparison tool should be developed and utilized so you can determine the quality of cat food for yourself. This could be as simple as creating a chart for yourself with key aspects to look out for. However, if you are really serious about feeding your cat high quality food, a more in-depth look into the ingredient label is required. The pet food industry, in terms of requiring information on the labels, is not as strictly enforced as labels for human consumption. This means there is a lot of room for deceit and trick words that puts the responsibility on cat owners to do research and understand what is really being put into cat foods.
