Cat Health Problems Blog

 Ask any veterinarian and I think you’ll find that they are busier than ever. These days, the majority of health problems they see are in younger and younger animals. As your cat gets older, you may expect to see signs of ill health associated with the aging process. But the health problems that most cats have these days are nothing to do with getting older.

More cats are having problems like cancer, allergies, and behavioral problems. Where does this come from? In a wonderful book called The Nature of Animal Healing by Martin Goldstein, D.V.M. he talks about how our animals’ immune systems have become weakened, resulting in more and more health problems. There is no doubt that our world has become more toxic, with more chemicals, more air and noise pollution, more stress. We need a strong immune system to handle everything that we’re bombarded with every day, and so do our cats. 

But there are several things that weaken your cat’s immune system that you may not even be aware of. These things (as I found out with my dog) result in various cat health problems and all the time, you think that what you’re doing is the right thing.

The major culprits are diet, stress and, in many cases, medications from your vet. Let’s start first with diet.

First of all, let’s think about what cats eat in the wild. They eat meat. They kill animals and eat them. So giving a cat an exclusively dry food diet does not resemble their natural diet at all. Not only that, giving them the same thing every day becomes extremely boring. How would you like to eat exactly the same thing day after day?

Let’s look at the ingredients of one of the most popular brands of dried cat food:

Brewers rice, soybean meal, corn gluten meal, meat and bone meal, ground yellow corn, beef tallow preserved with mixed-tocopherols (source of Vitamin E), fish meal, turkey by-product meal, phosphoric acid, salt, brewers dried yeast, dried liver digest, added color (Red 40, Blue 2, Yellow 5, Yellow 6 and other color), potassium chloride, choline chloride, tetra sodium pyrophosphate, taurine, DL-Methionine, zinc sulfate, ferrous sulfate, manganese sulfate, calcium carbonate, vitamin supplements (E, A, B-12, D-3), niacin, L-Alanine, calcium pantothenate, copper sulfate, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin supplement, pyridoxine hydrochloride, folic acid, citric acid, calcium iodate, biotin, menadione sodium bisulfite complex (source of Vitamin K activity), sodium selenite. 

First of all, none of those ingredients sounds like something a cat would eat naturally does it? Let’s look at some of the ingredients more closely:

Brewers Rice – This description is from About.com: The dried extracted residue of rice resulting from the manufacture of wort (liquid portion of malted grain) or beer and may contain pulverized dried spent hops in an amount not to exceed 3 percent. They also go on to say that this is an inexpensive form of carbohydrate and has very little nutritional value. Since cats don’t need much carbohydrate (and in fact, grain can be harmful as we’ll explore later) they say that if this is an ingredient in cat food, it should be way down on the list of ingredients. But here we see that there’s more of this than anything else.

Soybean meal – soybeans are not naturally digested by cats. After most of the oil is removed from soybeans, the remaining husks are ground up to make soybean meal.

Corn gluten meal – this is the by-product after the manufacture of corn syrup or starch, and is the dried residue after the removal of the bran, germ, and starch. Interestingly enough, if you do a search on this ingredient, it’s also used as a natural weed suppressant and fertilizer for grass lawns – doesn’t sound like something I’d particularly want to eat – not to mention it’s not something that a cat would naturally eat.

Meat and bone meal – now it looks like we’re getting to the good stuff, the meat. Notice it doesn’t say what kind of meat. You might think that it would be something like the meat you might eat, but it isn’t. The meat in cat food can come from any skeletal muscle of any slaughtered animal. It can come from diseased animals. There has also been evidence of euthanized cats and dogs being taken to rendering plants where the rendered material is used for livestock and pet food. 

Ground yellow corn – more corn. Again, corn is difficult for cats to digest, and can cause allergies, since it’s not a natural part of their diet. 

So those are the first 5 listed ingredients. It doesn’t sound particularly appetizing does it? Here are some links to other web sites which cover the issue of pet food ingredients in more detail.

http://www.acreaturecomfort.com/truthaboutpetfood.htm

http://www.bornfreeusa.org/facts.php?more=1&p=359