Thread: My opinion on foods... (For what it's worth)

I think your diet choices and reasoning seem very reasonable. However, your post and others about diet issues and "research" on the Internet do trouble me. I probably have a somewhat different take than most of you on Internet "research," being a professor and research scientist, and having been on the 'net before it was "the Internet" or WWW. Unfortunately, while the Internet is a great source for factual information, it is an even better source of unsupported opinions expressed as fact---i.e., pure BS. Frankly I have found virtually no scientifically sound information on cat foods. What I find is lots of unproven and poorly supported opinions being touted as if they are proven fact by various self-appointed "experts." Since it is very difficult to do the kind of research necessary to draw broad and definitive conclusions, one of my rules of thumb in judging the reliability of a website's information is to look at the kinds of claims they are making. Broad and definitive claims, without any citations of large-scale studies, mark the site's information as inherently unreliable. Move along, no real knowledge to be gained there. Worth about what you are paying to get it.

As far as I can determine, there have been almost no truly useful studies comparing various diets in cats. The Winn Foundation did fund one, and an article on it can be found here:
Cat Fanciers' Association: Role of Diet

One of the most interesting aspects of this article is that it conclusively demonstrates the limits of personal observations of pets in drawing conclusions about the healthiness of their diets:

After one week in the study, the cats on the rabbit diet all had significant improvements in their stool quality based on a visual stool grading system (developed by the Nestlé-Purina PetCare Company). After one month, the cats on the rabbit diet all had formed hard stools, while the commercial diet cats had soft formed to liquid stools. These differences persisted to the end of the feeding trial. The cats that were fed the whole rabbit diet outwardly appeared to have better quality coats

(Note: the point of the study was to look at intestinal health, and the cats in the study were specifically selected from a breeding colony that was known to have a number of common intestinal pathogens--this is the reason for the focus on stool quality)

Although it appeared that the raw rabbit diet was significantly beneficial for the stool quality and appearance of health in the cats, the sudden and rapidly fatal illness of one of the cats that were fed the raw rabbit diet for 10 months was chilling and unexpected. The affected cat was diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy due to a severe taurine deficiency. Moreover, 70% of the remaining raw rabbit diet fed cats, which appeared outwardly healthy, also had heart muscle changes compatible with taurine deficiency and could have developed heart failure if continued on our raw rabbit diet.

So the raw fed cats outwardly seemed "healthier" according to some measures--until they started dying from heart disease caused by this diet. Oops!! Guess the assessment of the animals health from stool and coat appearance wasn't too useful, was it? Unfortunately, this is really the only sort of assessment that any of us are in a position to make. So while sharing our various experiences is fine, don't take anyone's opinions too seriously, no matter how emphatically they espouse them. In fact, the more certain they are that they are right, the *less* you should probably trust them.