By Products In Wet Food

Hi all, I am a bit confused as to should I be giving my cat canned were food that has meat by-products as an ingredient? I am giving my cat Purina one pro plan.. need some advice

mrw5641 said:

Hi all, I am a bit confused as to should I be giving my cat canned were food that has meat by-products as an ingredient? I am giving my cat Purina one pro plan.. need some advice

Click to expand...

Well, most ( not all) articles will say not to feed by products since they can be kinda iffy as to WHAT products they are...what animal parts.
I will say that i fed my 3 cats purina for years ( friskies and beyond, with an occassional better brand)
I recently got rid of all purina, switched to better foods, no by products at all ( no soy, no artifical anything) and they have SO MUCH MORE energy, even my 12 year old! so i consider by-products like eating McDonalds at every meal. just No good
my thoughts only....good luck!

Depends on what the by-products are. They could be nutritious parts of an animal or unwanted and diseased parts. The problem is that cat food companies don't distinguish between these two.

I prefer not to feed any by-products, but if I had to feed them I would only feed specified ones. Things that say meat by-product or animal by-product can contain literally animal. Try to look for ones that specify chicken by-product (or at least poultry by-product), beef by-product, etc.

It depends on the company, I would guess. There is wide latitude as to what legally can go into pet food and a lot of web sources that are extremely invested in frightening people into thinking that companies do use this latitude and put everything in the food. I think Purina, from what I know, is in complete control of its food from source to production. My issue with Pro plan is that it is expensive and has basically the same ingredients as Fancy Feast. I don't remember if Pro plan has artificial flavoring which is one of the things that makes me not want to feed Friskies.

I spend more money on cat food than I do on human groceries. I offer "good for them" higher cost brands. Every brand has some less than ideal make up of either ingredients or source/place of manufacture. "Grain Free" a lot of times substitutes another type of carby vegetable like potato or peas. I see zero advantage to that over rice, for example. All of the starches are there as fillers to cut down on cost to the manufacturer and fill the 5.5 oz can with product that might not be all protein. Manufactures make up some marketing to push their added ingredients. Several companies add berries to the food and make up some reasons for it, even though it probably isn't available to cats to use in the way the label implies.

Canned food, including Friskies is still moisture heavy and protein oriented. The pates don't have wheat gluten or grains. The issue probably is the artificial flavoring.

I have been known to offer it to my cats as their 3rd meal of the day. AND I use Fancy Feast to get them interested in the better food as a kitty side dish.

I dont have a problem with by products per say, as cats do eat the whole animal in the wild. Legally meat by products can only come from cattle, pigs, sheep or goats. If different it must state poultry by products, or name the specific animal it comes from, such as venison by products, or chicken by products.

Meat meals are a different story, they can contain other animals besides the ones listed above, and i am more Leary of meat meals. i would want to see a specific animal listed, such as chicken meal.

I would rather see by products in a food, than more grains, fruits and vegetables.

this is a good description of by products, dont worry, no nasty photos or anything.

The Association of American Feed Control Officials > Consumers > What is in Pet Food

If I could triple-Purraise the posts from laura mae and duckpond , I would! IMHO, byproducts are far better to feed than carby ingredients like peas that sound good to humans but aren't appropriate for cats. Lots of ingredients that are listed by AAFCO as byproducts are very nutritious: plenty of pricey raw foods include organ meats, bone, and blood because they're good for cats. I feed them! Dr. Pierson even has a nice discussion of byproducts on her site here: Commercial Cat Foods

Like laura mae, I'm more wary of artificial stuff in foods like Fancy Feast and Friskies than the byproducts. I feed an occasional can of FF Classic as a treat (our picky cat loves it!) but don't like the menadione and enhancers. And I think the carrageenan is as much of a deal-breaker in Friskies as the rice. (Though I would certainly feed Friskies or FF short-term if it were all that would get a cat to eat... Friskies was perfect when our cats had respiratory infections. It stinks!) I would gladly feed more foods with byproducts if they didn't have those sorts of ingredients, some of which, like carrageenan, offer no nutritious value to cats in the first place. One thing to watch about foods with byproducts, though, is that some may have relatively high phosphorous levels. (I suspect that's from bone.)

Good luck, it's not easy to sort through all this!

I use Purina canned food. It's affordable and my cats will eat it. The moisture in it keeps them healthy. If the fancier canned foods were more affordable and if they tasted better to my cats, sure I would probably feed them. But we do the best we can. We have to balance what our cats will eat with what we can afford. I will never judge any canned food. Now dry food is a different story. I haven't found one yet that doesn't cause problems for my cats.

Thanks for the advice!

I've seen well-fed barn cats eating a horse placenta . So I don't have a problem with "fresh" by-products in a canned food.

But "by-product meal" can contain 4-D animals (diseased, down, dying, deceased), so I prefer to avoid that ingredient, but it's mostly in cheap dry food.

maggiedemi said:

I use Purina canned food. It's affordable and my cats will eat it. The moisture in it keeps them healthy. If the fancier canned foods were more affordable and if they tasted better to my cats, sure I would probably feed them. But we do the best we can. We have to balance what our cats will eat with what we can afford. I will never judge any canned food. Now dry food is a different story. I haven't found one yet that doesn't cause problems for my cats.

Click to expand...

Yep. If they won't eat something, then it is wasted money. I believe that Purina completely owns its own processing and canning plants. They do feeding trials. Some of the premiums have their foods canned by other plants and don't do feeding trials. Our pets are the feeding trials. While it might be much better not to have things like mendidone, It is a bigger problem when someone has spent nearly $3.00 for a can of food that gets recalled because it has e-coli or not enough taurine, or melamine plastic.

laura mae said:

Yep. If they won't eat something, then it is wasted money. I believe that Purina completely owns its own processing and canning plants. They do feeding trials. Some of the premiums have their foods canned by other plants and don't do feeding trials. Our pets are the feeding trials. While it might be much better not to have things like mendidone, It is a bigger problem when someone has spent nearly $3.00 for a can of food that gets recalled because it has e-coli or not enough taurine, or melamine plastic.

Click to expand...

Haven’t there been multiple class action law suits against Purina for the deaths of hundreds of pets?

I imagine in the entire world of pet foods there are multiple class action lawsuits against all companies that might be blamed for pet deaths. And when pets die prematurely, of course people are going to be very interested in knowing what may have contributed to those deaths. Whether the suits have actually show cause and effect is a different matter, right?

In the past i know that there was a huge problem with wheat gluten imported from China that affected many major brands but Purina was not one of them. I know in the past there has been huge problems with Evangers (small independent company based in Illinois). Recently BFF had a problem in Australia, Blue Buffalo at least with the dog food has had some problems.

I don’t trust most pet food companies, that’s why I mainly make my own food. But I know that Purina has had many problems in the past and actually the FDA has given their canning facilities warnings for improper upkeep of equipment and whatnot.

Ƀåstet said:

I don’t trust most pet food companies, that’s why I mainly make my own food. But I know that Purina has had many problems in the past and actually the FDA has given their canning facilities warnings for improper upkeep of equipment and whatnot.

Click to expand...

It would be helpful to have reliable sources for the claim.

FDA Warning to Purina Pet Food Plant

Purina Sued for Allegedly Killing Thousands of Dogs With ‘Toxic’ Food

FDA Releases Concerning Information About Beneful

That's dog food.

maggiedemi said:

That's dog food.

Click to expand...

I know. Same company.
Your choice to purchase Purina, I was just pointing out that having your own canning facility and claiming to run test trials doesn’t necessarily make a company trustworthy.

While a lawsuit may show liability, the presence of a lawsuit doesn't necessarily mean actual liability. It doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't culpability of course. I wonder with some of the claims how much of it has to do with the way dry food was stored. Even though dry foods have the appearance of being invulnerable to spoilage, it isn't.

The FDA story cited warns of a potential problem with the conveyor process for low acid canned food in terms of Purina's process for verifying safely cooked food. It further noted that no pet had received canned food that was affected. It was interesting to see the blog author's response to the comment raising the point of cause and effect. She immediately went down the road of a completely unrelated issue and equated pet food industry with the tobacco industry. I'm sure that's her opinion and clearly is the basis for her blog (which is to advocate for raw food feeding and paints all pet food companies as an irresponsible pet feeding choice). Raw food of course has a high risk of bacterial infection as well depending on how the meat is processed and handled. And with cats, there are specific dietary needs that one could easily miss in making a homemade diet without a pre-mix. And then what about the safety of the pre-mix? I tried a mix with some meats that I cooked myself. My cats HATED the pre-mix. It smelled like B vitamins and so I suspect that the company makes sure it has all the vitamins it is supposed to by increasing the vitamins--thus the smell.

I certainly can see the value of a homemade diet, particularly around the presence of some ingredients that are nearly impossible to avoid in any commercial food like excessive salt, iodine, and synthetic vitamin K. But even the K vitamin controversy, there is so little of it in the food, that the levels are not toxic. It gets added in order to make the food qualify for a "complete food." Seaweeds are added for the iodine ( I think). But for premium brands that may not have reliable testing, we don't know how much of the synthetic K is in the food, or how much iodine, etc.

sunflower7 said:

Well, most ( not all) articles will say not to feed by products since they can be kinda iffy as to WHAT products they are...what animal parts.
I will say that i fed my 3 cats purina for years ( friskies and beyond, with an occassional better brand)
I recently got rid of all purina, switched to better foods, no by products at all ( no soy, no artifical anything) and they have SO MUCH MORE energy, even my 12 year old! so i consider by-products like eating McDonalds at every meal. just No good
my thoughts only....good luck!

Click to expand...

What brands did you switch too when you stopped the Purina?