Unless you’re increasingly concerned about your cat’s health, particularly the quality of her food, you can be forgiven for wondering what the hell healthy cat food is.

Year after year, we see more and more worrying reports in the media that pets are dying on their journeys for one commercial pet food or another. A brand may be using melamine as a filler in their cat food. Another brand may be having trouble keeping its business premises salmonella-free.

There are as many problems with all commercial pet foods as there are brands.

Let’s take a look at some of them:

1. a filler is something all brands use to bulk up meat (by-products) to increase their profits
2. all brands use cheap meat (by-products), since the expensive cuts go for human consumption
3. the quality of meat (by-products) varies with different brands, but many contain hair, hooves, beaks, entrails (and contents), lab animals (which may be highly toxic from new drug tests), euthanized pets ( including toxic fleas). collars, tags, etc.), zoo animals and horses (which still contain the deadly chemical), roadkill, dead or sick farm animals
4. cheap meat (by-products) is very high in fat, as there is little human market for the fat
5. food is cooked for a long period of time at high temperatures – cooking removes enzymes and vitamins and can chemically alter the food
6. To try to remedy this nutrient imbalance, synthetic nutrients are subsequently added, which are difficult to digest and of limited use as they are all isolated
7. To ensure that cat ‘food’ has a long shelf life (which is in everyone’s interest except your cat), preservatives MUST be added (they may not have been added by the manufacturer, but they will have been added at some point) and these are typically preservatives that would never be allowed in human foods, due to their high toxicity

As horrible as the above may be, you don’t need to search to find a brand of cat food that doesn’t have any of the above. I’m sure some are emerging from the obscurity, but even on these you may find it difficult to be 100% sure they are consistent. We all have bad days, when we can’t get the ingredients we want. What happens then? Is your ethics compromised so as not to disappoint your clients? What happens if the business is sold? Will the new owner or manager have the same high standards?

To have consistently high-value healthy cat food, it’s best to start from scratch.

I hear you crying “I don’t know how”, “how do I make sure it’s balanced”, “sounds too complicated”, “I don’t have time”, “sounds expensive”, my cat don’t eat anything except one brand”.

Wellness cat food means getting back to nature. It means finding out what wild cats (which are naturally healthy and disease-free) eat. It means taking a little time to analyze your perceptions of what you think is the best cat food for wellness. Don’t forget that you have been programmed (another word could be brainwashed) by those who profit from spreading this misinformation.