There are many myths about cat food, just like there are many myths about our nutrition. Nutrition is a science that is frequently changing as people become more interested in it for themselves and their pets. One of the myths that we need to dispel right away is that you can tell very much from a pet food label. It's not possible to do that. The only thing that you get from a pet food label is what ingredients are in there. However, I can tell you that even that ingredient list is easy to manipulate. The more important things with a cat’s diet are digestibility and bioavailability. Is what they're eating being absorbed by their body? Is it in that food in a form that can be absorbed efficiently and easily by their body? Are the nutrients that are in there what's put on the label?

They also can do something called ingredient splitting. The public has now decided there are certain things that are bad to have in pet food. So pet food companies can split that into something different, call it two different things, and so it goes down lower in the label. So it looks like there's less of it in the diet, meaning it's no longer the first ingredient or one of the first ingredients. So I know I have people who frequently email me a label and ask me if it's a good diet. And I can tell you that it's simply not possible to tell if that's a good diet from a label. There are things to look for in foods.

The World Small Animal Veterinary Association has come up with a list of things that consumers should look at to choose a diet for their pet. That's a good resource. It is not a perfect resource. There are problems with the list. However, it's the best thing that we have right now. Though, some of the things on their list are a little difficult for a person to traverse. A second organization called the Veterinary Nutrition Alliance has taken some of the questions from the first association, and they've surveyed pet food companies to try and find those answers. So those are two resources. If you are looking to try and determine what might be best for your pet, those are two resources that you can look at.

Of course, we will help guide you. But again, there are new diets on the market coming out all the time, and we can’t be well-versed in all of them. No one can be well-versed in all of them. So it will take a little bit of detective work on your part. And again, you watch your pet and their health and determine if this diet is good for your pet. But that's one of my big beefs.

Another one I'll mention quickly is the byproduct concern. Many people are very concerned when they see byproducts on the label, but I want you to know that byproducts are organ meats. These are not indigestible products like hooves and feathers and beaks and nails. These are organ meats like the spleen, liver, and kidney. These are good for our pets. So I don't want you to have the impression that byproducts are bad for pets. They're highly edible, digestible, and nutritious.

That definitely could, yes. Cats don't typically regulate their intake. Some cats do. I have clients who leave the food out all the time, and their kitties are beautiful and lean, but that's not the norm. Most cats will overeat. So if you have a grazer, meaning you've tried to meal-feed your kitty, which is the ideal way to feed, even if it's multiple small meals a day, and they're not going to eat that way, then you have to control the number of calories that you're leaving out. So you have to control the food. So you can leave a set amount out that you've measured out in the morning. And when it's gone, it's gone. Or you can divide that set amount into two times that you put out—however you want to do it. But the bottom line is you need to control the number of calories they have exposure to every day.

No. Human food won't make your cat overweight. What will make your cat overweight is feeding more calories than they're expending and a sedentary lifestyle. Many of our kitties are inside now. And for important reasons, they stay inside. But part of the downside to an indoor lifestyle is they move their bodies less, and they have less to do. So we need to continue to engage them in interactive play and give them things to do to exercise their brains and bodies to burn those calories they should be burning. So again, in your mind now, it's not the food specifically. It's the number of calories that they're getting in excess.

That's kind of funny. No. Cats are hardwired to hunt. This is how they survived and stayed alive through their evolution. So an outdoor kitty that hunts isn't missing anything. Their bodies are enacting what their brain is telling them to do. Many people get angry at cats for hunting, but they can't help it. This is just part of who they are. And indoor cats will have hunting behaviors too.

Suppose your cat has a condition that a prescription diet can slow the progression of or reverse. In that case, absolutely, a prescription diet based on what your veterinarian is recommending is a good way to go. A healthy cat has no reason to be on a prescription diet. So that's something to discuss with your veterinarian, but I don't think you need to be afraid of prescription diets. Again, food is medicine, and if we can treat a disease through dietary means, in my opinion, that is a much better way to treat it than in other ways we can do that.

This is a controversial area right now. Many people think that canned food diets are better for cats. And the reason is that we do lose many older cats to renal disease or kidney disease. And cats are desert-adapted animals. They are formulated to have very efficient kidneys. And also, they were evolved basically to get their water from their food. Small rodents are what cats evolved to eat. And so canned food diets may be more appropriate for fulfilling that water requirement that cats don't get through a dry food diet. I think it's possible to have cats live a long, healthy life on dry food. However, in the last decade, we've been leaning towards cats at least having some of their calories come from a canned food diet. And part of that reason is that a lot of chronic diseases older cats develop require us to take them off of dry food and feed a canned-only diet.

So there are people out there saying, "Well, why don't we just do that from the get-go?" And that's a complex argument. So again, I think it's possible to have a healthy cat on dry food. I agree with the idea that at least part of their food should come from canned food so that they get more water and moisture.

There are vegan diets formulated for cats. However, I think it's important to know that cats are obligate carnivores. It's challenging to adequately control their nutrition on a strictly vegan diet. Even on a vegetarian diet, it becomes difficult to formulate a diet for cats. There are some on the market. However, studies that have been done on those diets show that their labels are often inaccurate, and they are deficient in the amino acids that are necessary for obligate carnivore bodies. They've also shown that those diets are often contaminated with mammalian DNA. So there are animal products in those diets.

I would not recommend that you feed either a vegan or a vegetarian diet to a cat unless there is a medical reason to do so, and your veterinarian has recommended that. If that's the case, then I would only use a prescription diet as these are frequently tested for contamination, and they've been formulated for cat-specific amino acid requirements. Or I would work with a veterinary nutritionist to formulate a vegan diet that you then home cook for your kitty.

There are many dog food myths. There are a couple that are big for me. One is that many people are very afraid to feed foods that have the word byproduct on the label. I think it's a poor understanding really of what byproducts are. Byproducts are organ meats. They're not the inedible parts of the animal. Byproducts are not horns, hooves, beaks, feet, hair feathers. Those are not allowed to be byproducts. Byproducts are organ meats. There's not a big demand in human nutrition for organ meats. A lot of people don't buy organ meats for themselves.

When animals go into pet feed, there's a lot of waste. What pet food manufacturers have done, they're able to buy those organs and put them into their diets, and they're tremendously healthy. I think honestly; dogs don't get enough organ meats in their diets. We're looking at lungs, spleen, liver, kidneys; all those things are very healthy, digestible, and nutritious for dogs. There's no reason to be afraid of the word byproduct.

There is some marketing in pet foods where they say, "Does not contain byproducts," but then if you look at the labels, they're listed out—heart, liver, etc. They're included in there, but they've gotten away from saying that they're byproducts, so they don't scare people off. Don't be worried about byproducts; they're very nutritious.

It could. Free-choice feeding is one of the culprits in obesity. There is undoubtedly a growing epidemic of obesity in our small animal patients, just like it is mimicking human obesity. We don't want to allow a dog to eat as much as they want.

There are a very small number of dogs that don't overeat, and with those animals, grazing is fine. We need to control how much the vast majority of dogs are eating, and meal feeding is an ideal way to do that.