All Natural Cat Food - Seven Good Reasons Why Nature is Best!

Feeding your cat an all natural cat food diet will improve her health, boost her immune system and create a happy cat. If you knew what went into most, if not all, commercial pet food, you would never buy it again. Truly, it’s not for the faint hearted.

Most commercial pet food ingredients are cheap, as the better quality food goes for the higher priced human food market. Cheap food can mean anything from high fat content, meat by-products (hair, intestinal contents, chicken feet, rancid fat, dead or diseased animals), to low grade carbohydrates such as sugar, left over fast food or spoilt grain unfit for human consumption to the melamine used to bulk out American pet food imported from China.

None of this is normal or natural cat food and much of it is indigestible, so can you wonder that overall, cats health is on the decline?

What can you do about it?

The first and most important thing to do is change your cat’s diet to a homemade, raw, all natural cat food, for seven good reasons.

1 Cats evolved on raw food over millions of years. They are best able to use this diet over all others.

2 Raw food contains all the essential vitamins, minerals, enzymes, amino acids and other nutrients, in the right amount, in a balanced form. Cooking destroys many essential nutrients.

3 Unlike processed cat food, natural cat food is easy to absorb and the cat utilises it efficiently.

4 An all natural cat food diet ensures your cat has healthy teeth and gums. Despite the claims, no processed cat food does this.

5 Parasites such as worms, fleas and ticks are minimal when you feed your cat this diet, as the environment of your cat’s body is not conducive to them. This is the opposite of processed food which makes your cat’s body a feeding ground for parasites.

6 All natural cat food keeps your cats immune system in good working order, so reducing or preventing many diseases, particularly the serious ones.

7 A hunting domestic cat is usually doing so to address an imbalance in their diet. A natural diet reduces a cat’s desire to hunt.

Whatever the health of your cat is like at the moment, changing her diet to all natural cat food will go a long way to the prognosis of her condition. However, it isn’t just a matter of substituting her processed food for raw meat. There are some important rules to follow and tips to consider.

All Natural Cat Food - Seven Good Reasons Why Nature is Best!

Feeding your cat an all natural cat food diet will improve her health, boost her immune system and create a happy cat. If you knew what went into most, if not all, commercial pet food, you would never buy it again. Truly, it’s not for the faint hearted.

Most commercial pet food ingredients are cheap, as the better quality food goes for the higher priced human food market. Cheap food can mean anything from high fat content, meat by-products (hair, intestinal contents, chicken feet, rancid fat, dead or diseased animals), to low grade carbohydrates such as sugar, left over fast food or spoilt grain unfit for human consumption to the melamine used to bulk out American pet food imported from China.

None of this is normal or natural cat food and much of it is indigestible, so can you wonder that overall, cats health is on the decline?

What can you do about it?

The first and most important thing to do is change your cat’s diet to a homemade, raw, all natural cat food, for seven good reasons.

1. Cats evolved on raw food over millions of years. They are best able to use this diet over all others.
2. Raw food contains all the essential vitamins, minerals, enzymes, amino acids and other nutrients, in the right amount, in a balanced form. Cooking destroys many essential nutrients.
3. Unlike processed cat food, natural cat food is easy to absorb and the cat utilises it efficiently.
4. An all natural cat food diet ensures your cat has healthy teeth and gums. Despite the claims, no processed cat food does this.
5. Parasites such as worms, fleas and ticks are minimal when you feed your cat this diet, as the environment of your cat’s body is not conducive to them. This is the opposite of processed food which makes your cat’s body a feeding ground for parasites.
6. All natural cat food keeps your cats immune system in good working order, so reducing or preventing many diseases, particularly the serious ones.
7. A hunting domestic cat is usually doing so to address an imbalance in their diet. A natural diet reduces a cat’s desire to hunt.

Whatever the health of your cat is like at the moment, changing her diet to all natural cat food will go a long way to the prognosis of her condition. However, it isn’t just a matter of substituting her processed food for raw meat. There are some important rules to follow and tips to consider.

Cat Food - the Best, the Healthiest, the Most Nutritious

We humans have a capacity of extremes. There are those of us who are honest to the letter and there are those of us who are equally dishonest. Stress often plays an important part of being dishonest, especially for a struggling businessman desperately trying to provide for his family.

Then there are those who are just plain greedy and don’t care how they arrive at their fortune as long as they do.

Luckily, in most countries, there is now a system in place that ensures a basic (some might say very basic) standard that all manufacturers or suppliers of human food must meet.

Sadly this is either not the case for animal feed, or the standards are so low as to be useless.

So despite all the pretty advertising, all the logically convincing and reassuring words from your vet, chances are, if you’re feeding your cat a processed cat food, you’re directly contributing to her ill health.

The big brand names in cat food contribute financially to veterinary colleges, which explains why vets surgery reception areas are now piled high with these brands. But does it spell quality?

To find out we need to look at what’s in processed cat food. Most fresh meat goes for human consumption as more money can be made there. So pet food tends to get the dregs. Dregs can include meat meal or meat by-products (chicken feet, feathers, hair, skin, intestinal waste (poo to you and me), general slaughterhouse wastes), meat not considered safe (spoiled or toxic) or desirable for human consumption, fat, diseased carcasses (which may be far from fresh), including euthanised animals.

To bulk this out, low cost carbohydrates are used, which can include sugar, propylene glycol, leftover fast food, mouldy and rancid grain deemed unsuitable for human consumption, corn syrup, non-nutritive fillers such as sawdust or newspaper and so forth.

So the cat food starts out as low quality, too low in digestible protein essential to a cats well being, too high in fat, too high in carbohydrates and possibly poisonous - 100 Bald and Golden Eagles in North America have died recently from eating a euthanised animal.

Then the ‘food’ is cooked, usually at very high temperatures. Cooking destroys many nutrients which are essential for good health. Cats evolved by killing and eating their food instantly, showing that freshness is essential for a cats overall good health.

To address this, the cat food manufacturers add synthetic nutrients. Synthetic nutrients are isolated and not easily digested by anyone let alone your cat. So a label reassuringly boasting of a ‘nutritionally complete’ or ‘scientific’ diet are purposefully vague as neither are true. Unqualified claims are legally acceptable in most countries with their poor or non-existent pet food regulations.

As this resultant cat food doesn’t look very appealing, colour is added (Red 40, Yellow 6, Yellow 5, Blue 2), obviously for your benefit as I doubt your cat cares much about the colour of cat food.

Now, most processed food is in a dry or semi dry form. This means that you have to preserve the food to keep it. If you purchase any meat product that keeps longer than a couple of days in the fridge, you know it has preservative in.

Some common preservatives include disodium guanylate, butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA), menadione sodium bisulfite complex (a very controversial synthetic vitamin K.), mixed-tocopherols (synthetic form of Vitamin E) and others considered unfit for human consumption.

All processed food is ‘dead’ food, with no life. Dead food is that which has been cooked, particularly at high temperature and for long periods.

So you might think that buying cat food direct from a pet food supplier or butcher might be the answer. A quality butcher I buy from once told me that most pet mince sold at butchers is all the excess fat they can’t use, mixed with beetroot juice. On further inspection of the pet mince in discussion, I didn’t doubt him.

I read recently of someone buying from a pet shop. As she walked up to the shop from the car park, she noticed a pickup truck loaded down with large boxes marked poultry. On closer inspection she saw they contained pre-packaged chicken pieces. Fresh chicken sitting in boxes, in the hot summer sun, not on ice, not in a refrigerated truck, but in the back of an open pick up truck waiting to be carried into the store for sale to consumers.

Diabetic Cat Food - How You Can Reduce the Need for Insulin

It is now generally accepted that human diabetes is an immune disorder. There seems no reason to suppose that feline diabetes is any different. This particular immune disorder has the form of failure of the pancreas to produce insulin.

An immune system brakes down because of the burden put upon it, mostly a chemical burden. When you consider all the chemicals most pets are subject to, there is little wonder their immune systems go on strike. Drugs, vaccinations, pesticides in the garden, harsh cleaners in the house, but perhaps worse of all by virtue of it’s frequent ingestion, are the preservatives in their daily diet.

A typical cat food is processed and comes in a box, packet or can. The dried cat food must contain high levels of preservative to keep it at room temperature, indefinitely, despite what the packet may say. Believe me, there’s no other way to have such a long shelf life.

Cats are particularly sensitive to chemicals, so readily succumb to them. A stay in a cattery may well overload them, as most catteries fastidiously clean their pens with strong disinfectants or bleach, to ensure there’s no cross contamination.

There are several things you can do immediately, to help your cat overcome this serious disease, even if they have had it a while. You never know how much good you can do until you try.

1. The first thing that’s really important to address is their diet. Start giving your cat a good quality, raw, diabetic cat food. Human grade raw meat, from a butcher, will generally not contain any preservatives or colour as most countries have laws against that.
2. It’s better to feed a diabetic cat 3 or 4 small meals a day, rather than 1 or 2 larger meals.
3. Diabetic cat food differs slightly from a normal healthy cat food by the fat content. The food must be low fat (but not no fat), as the pancreas is responsible for the production of enzymes which help break down fat.
4. No healthy cat food should contain any sugar, in particular diabetic cat food. Many, perhaps most, commercial cat food manufacturers use sugar as a filler. It bulks out the meat and is cheap, with a world glut.
5. No cat food should not contain large amounts of carbohydrates, which are a manistay part of almost all processed cat foods, including those for diabetic cats.
6. The mineral chromium assists the body in utilising the insulin more efficiently, so the addition of half to one teaspoon of brewers yeast to the diabetic cat food will help your cat. Chromium is also in liver, beef and spirulina.
7. Including vitamin E in the diabetic cat food reduces the amount of insulin required. Vitamin E occurs naturally in raw meat fat and spirulina. Vitamin E is also in eggs and wheat germ oil, but diabetic cat food should be low in oil and fat, so while these are recommended, they should be in small quantities. You can also supplement it in the d alpha tocopheral (the natural form). Try to avoid the synthetic form, which is more commonly used. Synthetic vitamins are not as well utilised by the cat. Dose 30 IU per day until you see improvement.
8. And play with your cat, so she gets some exercise. Exercise tends to decrease the need for insulin.

A good diabetic cat food, like any good cat food, is as close to that of a wild cats food as possible. Cats have evolved to efficiently use raw food. They can’t use processed and cooked food in the same way, as they lack the nutrients destroyed by cooking.

Once you have your cat regularly eating good quality raw food, she may need less insulin. And if it isn’t too far advanced, there’s no reason why she shouldn’t recover completely. Recovery from serious disease is not uncommon when the cause is addressed. Ensuring your cat only eats a healthy, high quality, raw, diet, at the very least will reduce her need for insulin.

Can Healthy Cat Food Contain Preservatives?

In this day and age of the mighty dollar masquerading as king, it becomes more and more difficult to trust businesses who have a vested interest in gaining your sale. As cats can’t talk to us, or perhaps I should say, as we can’t hear what cats are telling us, we don’t have that all important input to know if we are providing our cats with a healthy cat food.

If you do a quick search on the internet, you’ll come across practically all pet food manufacturers proclaiming their brand is ‘all natural’, ‘healthy’, ‘holistic’, even ‘organic’, but in every single case they are selling dry food.

Just think about it for a minute. Dried food which contains any form of meat just won’t keep at room temperature. Try keeping your steak out of the refrigerator for a few days and see what happens.

So how do pet food manufacturers keep cat food indefinitely at room temperature?

The only possible way to do this is to add preservatives. Despite many claims saying there are no preservatives, logic tells you there has to be.

Cooking in itself may preserve meat a little longer than raw meat, but not for weeks, or even years.

So what, you may be thinking, I know there are preservatives in some of the foods I eat and I seem to be OK. Surely a few preservatives doesn’t mean I’m not feeding my cat a healthy cat food?

I personally don’t think any preservative is OK. It may appear to be harmless in the short term, but in the long term there will be consequences.

But apart from my personal opinion, there are some laws, perhaps rather basic or not well enforced, in almost every country around the world, that protects human food. So all preservatives used in human food has to be considered ‘reasonably safe’ by some standards.

Unfortunately, there are no such safe guards in pet food. Or the laws are even less effectively enforced than the human laws.

So the preservatives used in cat food can be the most toxic. Does cat food containing highly toxic preservatives sound like a healthy cat food to you?

Ever heard of formalin? Embalmers use it to preserve dead bodies.

Formalin, also known as formaldehyde, is widely used in pet food to preserve it.

You probably haven’t heard of ethoxyquin. That’s a preservative used in the rubber industry. It’s in the tyres of your car. So what on earth is it doing in your cat food?

Lets look at ethoxyquin’s history. When factory workers were exposed to it, they exhibited side effects similar to those of agent orange:

• constant diarrhoea
• vision disorders including blindness
• organ failure
• organ cancers
• leukaemia

Are you getting a bit concerned? Perhaps your cat is suffering from some kind of organ damage? Here are a few other common preservatives used in cat food to keep it at room temperature indefinitely;

• sodium nitrite, which gives a nice rosy colour to food and can produce powerful carcinogenic substances known as nitrosamines
• propyl gallate - is now suspected of causing liver damage
• propylene glycol used to maintain the right texture and moisture content is used as coolant antifreeze in engines
• up to 1000 times more salt than occurs naturally

No manufacturer can keep preservatives out of dry cat food if it has a long shelf life.

So, if you don’t feed your cat a commercial cat food, what can you feed her?

To my way of thinking, the only sure way of knowing you are providing a healthy cat food is to prepare it yourself.

Before you throw your hands up in horror, saying you don’t know how, you don’t have time, that’s where I come in.

I’ve done the research for a balanced, healthy cat food.

I’ve made all the mistakes and can show how not to fall into the traps I did.

By feeding your cat a healthy cat food, you’ll have fewer trips to your veterinarian and your cat will live longer.

Holistic Cat Food For the Healthiest Cat

Once you’ve started looking around for holistic treatment for your cat, it’s a natural sequel to think about holistic cat food.

There’s a saying that currently people have never been so well fed, but so under nourished. As this is a direct result of poor farming methods as well as bad dietary advice, it’s no less true for your cat as it is for you.

Changing over the diet of your cat to a more natural one, will not only benefit him, but your pocket too. Because your cat is healthier on this diet, you’ll have fewer visits to your preferred cat health professional.

But what exactly am I talking about?

Well, an holistic cat food is one which so closely resembles a wild cat’s diet, as to be in the same league as far as health is concerned.

You’ll probably be relieved to know, I’m not suggesting you go out and catch mice. What I’m asking you to do is to consider the diet of a wild cat and then be mindful in duplicating it as closely as you can, within the framework of readily available food and the constraints on your time.

Actually, I’ve already done that for you, so you don’t have to do all the hard work. I just want you to know the reasons behind feeding your cat an holistic diet to ensure better health and longevity.

It’s worth remembering that cats have evolved on a wild diet over millions of years, and are extremely healthy on it. Otherwise they would have died out.

So trying to duplicate nature’s bounty for your cat is the best way to ensure his good health and longevity.

Providing an holistic cat food isn’t difficult once you’ve opened up your mind to the idea of it. Isn’t that always the biggest hurdle? Once you’re open to the idea the rest, as they say, is easy. With a bit of guidance from someone who has made all the mistakes possible.

A quality, balanced holistic cat food:

• will provide your cat with all his nutritional requirements.
• will make your cat content and much less interested in hunting - hunting domestic cats usually means they are lacking nutrients in their current diet and they’re trying to redress that
• is free from chemical residue, such as preservatives and colour, which cats are so sensitive to
• contains no synthetic vitamins or minerals - which are difficult to absorb and utilise so tend to be excreted
• is raw and so contain all the enzymes and other nutrients lost in cooking

Holistic cat food contains only naturally occurring vitamins and minerals, in a balanced and whole food form. You know, you shouldn’t need to supplement your cat’s food. All the necessary nutrients should come from the food, and in the wild, they do.

But, because modern farming methods cut corners in quality to boost quantity (and so profit), the resulting foods are often poor in nutrients. So supplementing becomes necessary.

Most supplements on the market today are isolated nutrients. In nature, nutrients are always found with other nutrients that they co-depend on. For example, calcium, phosphorus and magnesium must be in the natural balanced ratio and need vitamin A and D to be properly utilised. Iron, copper and cobalt co-depend on each other. And so on.

In addition to the isolation, most modern supplements are synthetic. Synthetic nutrients aren’t easily absorbed or utilised by the body. And you can overdose on synthetic nutrients more easily than on natural ones, which the body knows how to deal with.

Holistic cat food, on the other hand, is easily absorbed and utilised by your cat. The supplements are a whole food, and are nutrient dense. This means all that is needed is readily absorbed.

It is not time consuming to provide this diet, if you follow my easy feline dietary advice, It’s simply a question of being aware of certain pitfalls. It may take you and your cat a while to work things out, but it’s well worth it for the huge benefits which follow.