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My Wellness Matters

Posted in Uncategorized | December 15th, 2008

Thoughts on Wellness dry and wet cat food?

(Thanks to everyone who answered my last question)

Now I am thinking of definately adding wet food to my cats diet. And I really like the Wellness food. My local pet store recently started selling it and the ingredients really impressed me.

I am being told that wet food is the best thing to feed my 11 year old cat. However, I can’t seem to believe that completely (feel free to tell me more about why I should, I love to do research about all this just hate having to filter through all the bad sites to find the good ones).

So I was thinking maybe I can mix the dry and wet Wellness food and feed him that.

My cat is my family and I want him to have the best. Money definately matters… but I am willing to spend. Hopefully I can still afford to feed myself in the end though!!

(and my cat drinks alot of water on his own. and i brush his teeth frequently)

any helpful thoughts and information on all this and just cat nutrition in general is welcome.

Thank You!

Once upon a time, dry food really was thought to have a benefit for pets’ dental health. Recently the overall health benefits of wet food has been discovered, and is being taught in veterinary schools. So if your vet has been in practice for more than a few years, s/he may simply be relying on old information. I had thought about adding a bit on the myth of dry food being good for teeth in my answer to your previous question, but my answer was pretty long already. So I’m glad to have the chance to address this issue now.

It is a myth that dry food helps clean teeth. This article http://www.littlebigcat.com/index.php?action=library&act=show&item=doesdryfoodcleantheteeth explains it. Dry food generally has more refined carbohydrate, which causes tooth decay. And it is not like cats really chew their food so thoroughly that there would be much scrubbing action going on. Cats who eat only dry food still need regular dental care – both at home (you are a hero, brushing your cat’s teeth – I can’t manage that), and professionally at the veterinarian’s. Feeding a cat dry food in order to keep teeth clean is really a bit like having a dentist advise us to eat pretzels to clean our teeth – it’s just not beneficial.

As for wet food, if carefully chosen to have a high amount of protein and a greatly limited amount of refined carbs, the cat’s teeth should be healthier due to not having the carbs causing tooth decay. Plus, the increased amount of water in the food will be healthier for the rest of the cat’s body in the long run. As a species that developed originally for desert survival, cats are meant to derive most of their water requirement from the bodies of prey animals. So their thirst instinct is not as well-developed as it could be. A cat fed on dry food will be chronically dehydrated because it simply will not ingest enough water to make up for the lack of liquid in the food – no matter how fresh and appealing their water dish or fountain or leaky faucet or toilet may be.

Since your budget is not unlimited, here is something to think about that I hope will ease your mind. The cheaper brands are cheaper because they have so much in the way of cheap filler – i.e. grain. Because cats are obligate carnivores, they are not designed to digest grains very well, and do not derive much nutrition from them. In order to get the nutrients that they need from the cheaper foods, cats will eat more. Because the better foods are more nutritionally dense, cats are more satisfied eating less. I know that I can feed my cats portions of foods such as Natural Balance, Eagle Pack, Merrick, Nature’s Variety, Wellness, Blue Buffalo, and several others, that are half the size of the portions I fed them of Iams or Hill’s products. This offsets the difference in price. Also, I have learned by hard experience that the less I spend on cat food, the more I spend at the veterinarian’s office. Of all the times that I have taken my cats to the veterinarian for over the last eleven years that had nothing to do with the quality of the food they eat – there was one birth defect (umbilical hernia), the usual maintenance (shots, spay, neuter, annual exams, dental cleanings), and one infection that were unrelated to what the cats were eating. Every other health issue my cats had, including several episodes of bloody stool, scratching ears bloody from reactions to food allergies, struvite crystals – hundreds of dollars in veterinary costs, were all from diet. So don’t forget to factor those costs into your pet food budget, eh? Oh, and one incalculable benefit of feeding the higher quality foods – because they eat less and digest more of it, their poo tends to be smaller and less… um… fragrant.

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