Message to Cat Food Manufacturers: Cut Out the Sugar!

Added sugar in cat food

Two useful tags. Click either to see the articles: Toxic to cats | Dangers to cats

There is too much sugar in a lot of commercially manufactured cat food. There is too much sugar in processed commercially manufactured human food. The big multinational corporations, which manufacture and supply cat food worldwide are very good at making a profit. Their packaging and marketing is excellent. They give the impression that their focus is on cat health. One of the best examples is linking “science” to cat food quality – Hills Science Diet®. This dry cat food is sold in vet clinics to give added credibility.

To add to the doubts about cat food quality, the carbohydrate content in wet food is not listed while protein, fat and fiber are. You have to work out the sugar content by deduction and then work out the percentage on a dry matter basis. This presents a big obstacle for many people. Where this occurs, it is a deliberate lack of transparency, I allege.

We can see the similarities in the deficiencies in cat and human foods. We also see the similarities in the outcome. Before our eyes we see a slow moving epidemic of human obesity (UK and USA) and a sharp increase in incidence of type 2 diabetes – doubling in the USA over the period 1997-2007¹.

There is an almost mirror image increase in feline obesity and some vets tell us that there is also an increase in cat diabetes.

“Most veterinarians agree that they are seeing more and more feline diabetic patients as time goes by” (Your Cat by Elizabeth M Hodgkins DVM).

There are calls amongst a group of scientists in the UK to cut back on the amount of sugar that companies add to their food products for people. They are asking for a 30% reduction.

For humans,

“Added sugar has no nutritional value whatsoever and causes no feeling of satiety. Aside from being a major cause of obesity, there is increasing evidence that added sugar increases the risk of developing type 2 diabetes..” (Aseem Malhotra – cardiologist at Croydon University Hospital).

For cats,

“…the most important environmental factor that causes diabetes is the diet…Because today’s cat is almost always eating dry cat food, with its extremely high sugar content, a cat with any genetic tendency to become obese and/or become diabetic will do just that when sugar is a large part of its diet….” (Your Cat by Elizabeth M Hodgkins DVM).

“Carbohydrates constitute between 30 percent and 40 percent of dry cat food” (University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine).

You’ll find that the contribution of calories in dry cat food is similar between fats, protein and carbohydrates. This is clearly unsatisfactory when you consider that the ideal cat food is a mouse: 40% protein, 50% fat and only 3% carbohydrates.

It is not just dry cat food that contains high sugar content. Some wet cat food do as well. You’ll have to work out the carbohydrate content (dry matter basis) and get to know the good ones.

It is time for cat food manufacturers to stop fuelling a cat obesity epidemic and rises in feline diabetes. I ask them: please begin to cut out the sugar content.

Note: cats don’t taste sugars. It is added in dry food because the manufacturing process requires it an in wet food because it is a cheaper source of calories.

 

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25 thoughts on “Message to Cat Food Manufacturers: Cut Out the Sugar!”

  1. Jason ridicules the cat fancy version of the Turkish Angora. I don’t have his DNA picture but if the cats from his locality are a guide (I have some of their results) he can be over 90% pure Turkish Angora. Yes, substantial. Good word Michael. He tends to get his way!

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    • The American cat fancy Turkish Angora is quite “foreign” in appearance. Way too slender. I guess the breeders though it looked more “refined”. Jason is total different to the typical American TA and he is gorgeous.

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  2. Hi Caroline. I live in North Cyprus, the Turkish part. There are masses of olives trees in this area if not all over Cyprus. Last year I had an enormous crop of olives which people come and pick for you and pay back with lots of bottles of super olive oil. They take the rest for selling. The trees got too much foliage and started hanging down to the ground. The usual practice is to cut off all the branches leaving only the trunk with the rumps.. They grow back very quickly and you get a better crop of olives than leaving them to overgrow. Yes it is quite a job looking after them all but I don’t know of many people who understand what treasures they are. They are the original Turkish Angoras with up to 98% pure E Mediterranean/Anatolian DNA markers, and they are in need of a little protection because of the lack of understanding of the average person. The cats love the log fire and strangely don’t seem afraid of it and get too close sometimes. My outside gang of males don’t get to enjoy the log fire but they have a great natural life. Since becoming outdoors cats they have blossomed into very large fluffy cats. My Turkish friend Alattin says ” Kedi yok! Kopek! which means they are not cats they are dogs. (Too big!) Here is just one of them, Jason. A friend has located 3 lovely pure-black Turkish Angora kittens in need of a home. here we go again. It’s so easy to get overloaded. I have also located a super fluffy tabby Angora at a restaurant who is friendly with me but no-one else. . Hm.

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  3. lot of good replies on this subject. Far too much to comment on in detail at the moment but I read them all and learned a lot. Now I have to check on the worker who is trimming off my olive tree branches down to the trunk so that they will grow afresh in spring and summer, and carry on repairing some cat enclosures, feeding a cleaning 30+ cats, etc. etc. At least i will have a lot of logs for my open fire.

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    • Harvey, I had no idea that you care for so many! I can picture you, friends and cats relaxing around the open fire in the evening, enjoying the wonderful fragrance and sounds of crackling logs and twigs. Esp after a satisfying day’s work of cleaning up after the precious little rascals 🙂 (Are your trees the real McCoy?–where do you live?)

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  4. Great article and fueled commentary! My cats get their individual diets b/c it’s one way of showing respect for having them in my life. Chicken liver, gizzards(cheap filler that most of them enjoy), raw chicken meat(very fresh and from trusted source), cooked beef, raw beef, cooked chicken and 2oz of high-quality dry(Blu, Nature’s Recipe) are what my kitties get daily. I buy on a good sale, and freeze for later. It sure beats going through 72 cans every two wks. And, I enjoy making sure they eat right. Kitty treats are Zuke’s Glucosamine Chondroitin Chicken for the elderlies and Greenies Chicken for the young ones 😉 (that reminds me, remember the BBC sitcom “The Young Ones”? I hadn’t thought of that in years)

    Salmonella contamination is always first and foremost on my mind, esp w/the raw chicken. I have never been ill from it, even though I know that my cats do shed it in the household. (I swear that many of us catlovers have a higher degree of tolerance to many of the bad microbes, and parasites. Esp if you keep high levels of good gut bacteria, and you shared your ice cream cone with stray kitties as a child 😉 ) Here is a tidbit from Canadian Vet. J.#47,2006:

    “Of great concern is the recent interest in raw diets for pets. The Internet is replete with sites that popularize raw food and its supposed health benefits. These diets significantly increase the risk that humans will acquire Salmonella. In a study of a small number of dogs, 30 percent of them fed a biologically appropriate raw food diet were shedding Salmonella, and 80 percent of the food samples were positive.11

    Feeding these diets results in routine contamination of owners’ homes through potentially infectious materials such as raw chicken. Dogs are not known to be especially clean eaters and it is highly likely that infectious organisms are disseminated throughout the home.

    Even if owners try to limit contamination by thorough cleaning, they may not be successful. In an experiment, both plastic and steel bowls were inoculated with 2 grams of meat containing Salmonella. The bowls were either warm-water rinsed, rinsed and scrubbed, scrubbed with soap, soaked in 10 percent bleach, put in a dishwasher at 85 degrees Celsius, or rinsed and washed and then soaked in bleach for 5 minutes.

    Salmonella was cultured in more than two-thirds of bowls with the exception of the scrubbed and bleached ones, where still over 40 percent were positive.”

    We have had Salmonella outbreaks in sprouts, chili peppers, lettuce, you name it–it’s not all just raw chicken. But the significance here is that if a human builds a slow tolerance to it, almost all of the S. strains, even new ones, will not put you down for the count. Esp. if you keep your beneficial floral counts high in your gut. BTW, my cats all seem to truly enjoy my plain greek yogurt, and will jump on me for a lick. I haven’t yet researched whether it’s actually good for them, but will check on that yet today.
    Did I go off on a tangent? sorry, I enjoy bacteria! 😉

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    • Great comment Cal. Vets discourage cat owners from preparing their own raw cat food diet for the reasons you state: bacteria and handling problems. Therefore manufacturers owe it to our cats and us to make some damn good raw cat food that is sold in supermarkets. Come on you lazy multinationals!

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  5. I don’t believe there is such a thing as high quality cat food. High priced cat food, yes. but where is the difference between low priced and high priced food? Hills Science Diet for this and that condition is complete nonsense. How can a food be for urinary tract health when it is loaded with carbohydrates and hardly any real animal protein?? They all have the same bad ingredients and some with well known dangerous preservatives.

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  6. A young friend of mine worked for awhile at a popular fast food chain. I won’t say which one, since I only have her word on this, but she said they added sugar to everything on the menu, including the salads. Absolutely everything on the menu has sugar in it. Now why would they do that? Probably because sugar is addictive. Eat too much of it and you feel like crap, but then three hours later you crave it. Food manufacturers use sugar, lots and lots of sugar, because it’s easy to get hooked on it. Cats get hooked on it too. That’s why the cheaper cat foods are like crack. The cats actually prefer them, turning up their noses at the really high quality cat foods. It’s all the extra carbs in food that get them hooked, keep them coming back. That’s my theory anyway. In the meantime, human animal or furry animal, it’s just not good for us. Yet you hear all the time low fat this and low fat that. To keep the taste without the fat they just add a little more sugar. Some low fat products are higher in calories and sugar.

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