Thread: USA MC Owners - what do you feed?

We feed both wet and dry to our four MCs. For wet we primarily use a rotating set of Fancy Feast flavors, so cannot help you with something different than Fancy Feast. We have tried virtually every canned cat food on the market in the US, and only Fancy Feast is consistently eaten. I could write you a review similar to Bubba's, but it would read: gourmet brand #1: hated it, wouldn't even go near it; gourmet brand #2: took one lick then would never go near it again, etc. We have wasted several hundred dollars trying various "better" brands. The only canned cat foods that our four will quite consistently eat (besides Fancy Feast) are a few of the Natural Balance flavors. Even with Fancy Feast, there are flavors that none of our cats like, and they all get tired of a flavor if fed too much. E.g., our 2+ year old male Remy last month was barely eating wet, and would have nothing to do with any of the Fancy Feast Tuscany or Primavera flavors. This month he is back to eating a significant amount of wet, and mainly wants Tuscany and Primavera flavors!!

As for feeding amounts, the Fancy Feast website says this for Shredded Fare:
Daily ration for an average adult cat is 1 can per 3 pounds of body weight. Feed up to twice this amount to kittens.

Some flavors say one can per 2 1/2 lbs. while the Classic (no gravy) says per 3 1/2lbs. You can look the ingredients, etc. up on the Fancy Feast website: Gourmet Cat Food, Wet Cat Food, Dry Cat Food, Kitten Food | Fancy Feast®

So a 14lb MC would be at the 4-6 cans per day range. We go through anywhere from 6 to 10 (and sometimes more) cans per day, bought mostly at Walmart, as Fancy Feast is significantly cheaper there than Kroger or Petco (though Walmart does not carry a couple of flavors). I frankly do not even want to know how much per year this adds up to.

As for this business about low carb flavors...well there are no Fancy Feast flavors that come even remotely close to 10% carbs from what I can see. The ones I looked at are 0% (given roundoff) to 2% carbs (carbs are not listed, so add up all other percentages and subtract from 100, duh). It is true that most of the flavors have gravy and so very small amounts of wheat gluten and/or corn starch. Obviously, if you believe that wheat gluten is a major health risk for cats or people, then avoid these. I know Purina stated that they would test all wheat gluten themselves after the Chinese gluten problems. I see absolutely none of the sort of symptoms of wheat gluten sensitivity in any of our current MCs, so I don't worry about it at all (of course, I can point you to plenty of Internet articles claiming that wheat gluten consumption is one of the major health risks for humans, blah, blah, blah).

There are lots of "high end" brands on the market in the US, and we have tried most of them. If you can find some YOUR cat will eat, great. As I said, we have wasted several hundred dollars looking, and failed. It gets pretty depressing when you buy some new brand, it smells great to us, but all four cats take one whiff and immediately walk off with disgusted looks on their faces.

All of our cats enjoy the dry as well as wet, so I would never want to feed only wet. We have multiple fountains and all cats seem to drink plenty, so I am not worried about lack of fluid intake due to the dry. The dry foods we use are all very high quality (high protein, low carb/grain), so there is no real difference with canned other than moisture. The three dry foods we use are: (1) Pro Plan Selects chicken; (2) Blue Wilderness chicken; and (3) Wellness Core. Note that all of these companies/brands have cheaper, lower protein lines as well (e.g., basic Wellness is not the same quality as Wellness Core).

Thanks for your help, everyone! I'm sorry - I know I've posted similar threads before.

I guess I am looking for high-meat content rather being brand conscious... Innova Evo looks good for meat-content, so does Taste of the Wild (although, at 99c per can... 4-6 cans per day could prove to be pretty pricey!). Everyone seems to go for Fancy Feast, but the meat content is fairly low and the by-products are high up on the list of ingredients!

Hi Meredith. I'd agree with NCarver though - I get what you're saying about the high meat content, and that's why I switched Freyja to Applaws. However, she clearly prefers the taste of whiskas to Applaws or three other high-meat brands I tried her on, and if that wasn't arguement enough to switch back, I also found that she had very soft (sometimes runny) stools on the high-meat foods. I'm sure I've seen a few other MC owners on this forum with similar issues.

Like NCarver, I'd love to feed both of mine on protein-rich, high quality foods, and am in the position where I could afford to shell out for some of the mid-range ones. Unfortunately, my MC's taste buds and bowl movements dictate what I buy them, so 'chuck everything in and make it taste good' brands like Whiskas are what I've got to feed them. Good luck with your search, hopefully you'll have better luck!

Originally Posted by Meredith

Everyone seems to go for Fancy Feast, but the meat content is fairly low and the by-products are high up on the list of ingredients!

Remember that canned food is mainly water. Protein content looks low because most of what is in the can is water. Here is the analysis for Fancy Feast Classic chicken:
Crude Protein (Min) 11.0%
Crude Fat (Min) 5.0%
Crude Fiber (Max) 1.5%
Moisture (Max) 78.0%
Ash (Max) 3.0%
Taurine (Min) 0.05%

Note that it is 78% water. That means that only 22% of what is in the can is not water. So protein is in fact 50% of the non-water content. I looked up chicken protein and moisture content data. Best info I found was cooked chicken breast is 30% protein and 50-60% water. So in cooked chicken breast, protein makes up 60-75% of the non-water part. So while the FF is less, the 11% figure is rather misleading. We are really talking 50% vs. 60-75% (and the latter is for chicken breast meat, which is highest in protein %). Remember that cat food also has to have all the minerals and such that cats need, while chicken breast alone does not. The minerals end up under "ash," and make up 14% of the non-water part of the FF. The other interesting thing is that the fat content of the FF is much higher than cooked chicken breast (without skin): 5/22=23% vs. about 4% [OOPS: wrote the wrong amount here, as fat is 4% of whole chicken breast so about 4/.5-4/.4 or about 8-10% of the non-water content.]

Now the Shredded Fare chicken is a bit different:

Crude Protein (Min) 14.0%
Crude Fat (Min) 2.0%
Crude Fiber (Max) 1.5%
Moisture (Max) 78.0%
Ash (Max) 3.5%
Taurine (Min) 0.05%

So here protein is 14/22 = 64% of the non-water part. This is comparable to cooked chicken breast, so definitely not low in protein. It is also only about twice the fat as in skiinless cooked chicken breast, which seems reasonable.

As for your other concern, meat by-products being "high up on the list of ingredients"...unfortunately, in the US ingredients are listed in order by weight fraction, but no data about the fraction is given. So, you could have three ingredients, A, B, and C, where A makes up 99%, and B would still be listed second even though it was <1%. So the ingredients list does not tell you how much meat by-product in in the food.

Here are the first few ingredients in two FF chicken varieties:
Classic: Chicken, chicken broth, liver, meat by-products, fish, poultry by-products,...
Fare: Poultry broth, chicken, wheat gluten, liver, meat by-products, spinach,...

As I already noted, cooked meat has around 60% water in it, but the canned food is nearly 80%, so the broth is supplying the additional water. What would the relative amounts of something with 60% water and 100% water have to be to average out to 80%? Equal of course. So the broth would have to be approximately 50% by weight of the ingredients...and yet chicken comes first in the Classic. While this is all very approximate, it is clear that the first two ingredients alone (chicken and broth) would have to make up an extremely high fraction of the ingredients, so it is simply not possible for meat by-products to be significant. With the Fare, we also see that the by-products are two steps down from wheat gluten. Just how much wheat gluten do you think it takes to make a tablespoon or so of gravy? Not much (by weight, remember). And yet the by-products are not just less than this, but also less than something else. Again, giving this some thought shows that meat by-products have to make up an extremely small fraction of these foods. I too used to be concerned about a few of the ingredients in Fancy Feast until I actually took the time to consider how much of these things could be in the foods. Once I realized it was darn little, I quit worrying. (You are of course free to worry about anything you choose!)

Of course the big question may be, is it reasonable to pay $.80 for a can of something that is almost 80% water? Of course some of the expensive brands that have less water (and thus higher protein %) have such a sticky consistency that the cats do not even seem to know how to eat them. We sometimes have to add water!

Originally Posted by NCarver

...!

WOW!!! Thank you so much for taking the time to explain! I'm still so undecided on foods... but, Fancy Feast sounds a lot better to me now! Thanks!