Good canned foods: what to look for?

Victor Martinez wrote:
AlexZ wrote:
Meat content: First few items should be meat? (By-products ok?)

Absolutely! Cats are carnivores, nor herbivores. I don't feed by-products.

Cats eat by-product in the wild all the time. What is the implication
linking by-products and herbivores?? What are you trying to get at?

Victor Martinez wrote:
AlexZ wrote:
Meat content: First few items should be meat? (By-products ok?)

Absolutely! Cats are carnivores, nor herbivores. I don't feed by-products.

What do you mean by by-products? I wish petfood companies would list
by-products for what they really are. Some do, some don't. Things
like offal (liver, kidney, heart) are excellent sources of nutrition
for cats. Foods that list "liver" are good. Foods that list "liver
flavor" aren't good in that they're using synthetic liver.

"PawsForThought" wrote in message
oups.com...


I wish petfood companies would list
by-products for what they really are.


Yes, and that goes for human food, too. I wish manufacturers/producers were
required to list ingredients *in plain English* (or the language of the
nation where it is sole). One almost needs to be a detective to decipher
some ingredients.

MaryL

"PawsForThought" wrote in message
oups.com...

Victor Martinez wrote:
AlexZ wrote:
Meat content: First few items should be meat? (By-products ok?)

Absolutely! Cats are carnivores, nor herbivores. I don't feed
by-products.

What do you mean by by-products? I wish petfood companies would list
by-products for what they really are. Some do, some don't. Things
like offal (liver, kidney, heart) are excellent sources of nutrition
for cats. Foods that list "liver" are good. Foods that list "liver
flavor" aren't good in that they're using synthetic liver.


Yes, I should have mentioned why I don't want byproducts as the first
ingredient--precisely because they don't tell you what is really in there.
I recognize that muscle meat isn't the only thing cats need. Good point.

MaryL -OUT-THE-LITTER wrote:

: I think it would be a good idea to post information about optimum
: nutritional data. However, there are already some web sites that post the
: actual nutritional analysis by brand and variety, so you may simply be
: duplicating work that has already been done. Here are some examples
: (including both canned and dry food, although I realize that your request
: was for canned food only):

The web pages you mention give numbers but don't tell me which % is
good and where it begins to get bad. Also the page is 3 yrs old (some
formulas could have changed?) and the updated page has many fewer
entries. Still, it is a good source. I just don't know how to interoret
the % numbers.

" wrote:

: Cats eat by-product in the wild all the time. What is the implication
: linking by-products and herbivores?? What are you trying to get at?

As I understand it, thanks to pages like
http://www.littlebigcat.com/index.ph...=show&item=004

the problem is not with "byproducts" in a natural setting but with what
gets called "buproducts" in industrial food production. Even good
quality pet food is basically a byproduct of human foods, and what gets
labeled as "byproduct" could be very poor quality in terms of chemical
impurities, diseased meat, etc. Or so I understand thus far.

So the question is not what happens in the wild, but how to safely
inerpret the words used by our industries?

"AlexZ" wrote in message
...
MaryL -OUT-THE-LITTER wrote:

: I think it would be a good idea to post information about optimum
: nutritional data. However, there are already some web sites that post
the
: actual nutritional analysis by brand and variety, so you may simply be
: duplicating work that has already been done. Here are some examples
: (including both canned and dry food, although I realize that your
request
: was for canned food only):

The web pages you mention give numbers but don't tell me which % is
good and where it begins to get bad. Also the page is 3 yrs old (some
formulas could have changed?) and the updated page has many fewer
entries. Still, it is a good source. I just don't know how to interoret
the % numbers.

Yes, I would like to see the pages updated. The % refers to each nutrient
as a percent age of calories (kcal).

MaryL

MaryL -OUT-THE-LITTER wrote:
: "AlexZ" wrote in message
: The web pages you mention give numbers but don't tell me which % is
: good and where it begins to get bad. Also the page is 3 yrs old (some
: formulas could have changed?) and the updated page has many fewer
: entries. Still, it is a good source. I just don't know how to interoret
: the % numbers.
:
: Yes, I would like to see the pages updated. The % refers to each nutrient
: as a percent age of calories (kcal).

Sorry, by not being able to interpret, I meant I don't know if 0.067%
of something is good, bad, acceptable, dangerous, etc. Just lack of
education on my part, but I thought it would be nice if after years and
years of discussions and debates a group like this could evolve a
concrete list people could refer to.

"AlexZ" wrote in message
...
MaryL -OUT-THE-LITTER wrote:
: "AlexZ" wrote in message
: The web pages you mention give numbers but don't tell me which % is
: good and where it begins to get bad. Also the page is 3 yrs old (some
: formulas could have changed?) and the updated page has many fewer
: entries. Still, it is a good source. I just don't know how to
interoret
: the % numbers.
:
: Yes, I would like to see the pages updated. The % refers to each
nutrient
: as a percent age of calories (kcal).

Sorry, by not being able to interpret, I meant I don't know if 0.067%
of something is good, bad, acceptable, dangerous, etc. Just lack of
education on my part, but I thought it would be nice if after years and
years of discussions and debates a group like this could evolve a
concrete list people could refer to.

Oh, sorry. I agree...there have been some discussions, and I failed to
bookmark them. I hope someone can direct us to a good source for this
information (although there is a lot of disagreement, of course!).

MaryL

wrote:
Meat content: First few items should be meat? (By-products ok?)

Absolutely! Cats are carnivores, nor herbivores. I don't feed by-products.


Cats eat by-product in the wild all the time. What is the implication
linking by-products and herbivores?? What are you trying to get at?

Actually, cats tend not to eat feathers or beaks. I have no idea what
"by-products" actually contains, anything from beaks to diseased
animals. There was no linking anything. If you read the original
sentence, there were two questions asked. Which I answered.

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Victor M. Martinez
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