How to Choose Healthy Cat Food Brands?

 

Good afternoon this is dr. Bobby conferring lead veterinarian with Aspen Grove vet care coming to you from Fort Collins Colorado today we wanted to talk a little bit about choosing a good healthy cat food this is can be kind of a daunting process you walk into a pet store and there's just aisles and aisles of pet food out there we're not sure

which one to grab for we are going to talk mostly today about kibble and canned versions of course we won't necessarily go into homemade diets but when looking at cat foods from that stance we have a few things that we want you to keep in mind one of them is to always look for what's called an affidavit which is just an American

Association of food control officers it's a group it is not a government group but a private organization that makes sure that the products that you're getting are actually what they say so

when you look at the back of a bag it's not only going to give you the guaranteed analysis of proteins and carbs and all the vitamins and minerals but it also usually has a statement that says that this food is either formulated or has been actually done feed trials with actual animals to make sure that

it's healthy for them that they didn't have problems with that food that it didn't make them sick they could keep their weight up they grew properly some of those factors so keep in mind that's a great statement to look for and the biggest thing I love to see is actual feeding trials because that means

 they've taken the effort to do that so that's a big portion to start with the other is the ingredients I like

to look at the ingredients in the list of them and I like to try to make sure that they are proper ingredients that a cat would want cats are definitely obligate carnivores so you do want to

have a high-protein diet that's based upon the meat of animals and so we're not looking for necessarily meal products but we'd like to see the phone chicken things like that that says

they actually took those products and made them into a diet I think it makes a huge difference I'm a big fan of looking at the manufacturer you can go online and look these guys up and look for problems that they might have had if a manufacturer consistently has problems with their food

I tend to avoid them of course we're looking at manufacturers that also have licensed veterinarians that are PhD nutritionists that have been on staff and have been actually there to work with all of these products you can find that information out I know a lot of people don't go to the point of looking at manufacturers too much they look at the ingredients they look at the packaging and and some of the advertising but really looking deep into the manufacturer makes a huge difference

I look at that track record more than anything else a couple of other things that we can talk about too that are important that some people don't really keep in mind as some of the language that they put on a bag can be quite confusing and the only thing that's really regulated out there by the the government officials is going to be the word organic so organic has some specific regulations that are connected with it compared to everything else natural holistic all of those things anybody can say anything about that they can throw it onto a bag and it really doesn't mean anything so keep in mind certain words are just out there one of the things I might shoot off with a cat food a little bit to keep in mind to

when you're thinking about kibble and you only have one cat in your household

I always recommend that you buy a smaller bag don't go out and buy the 40 pound bag of cat food because you only get about a month's worth of preservation when you open that bag up so it's gonna spoil within that time frame so keep in mind a smaller bag is always much more helpful if you keep all of these things in mind getting a good quality product something that you know is a manufacturer-approved product that

you're happy with those guys that are making it it has those ingredients that you're looking for you're gonna do great you're gonna provide a good quality product to your pet and they're gonna thrive