Any reason you're trying to avoid fat? It's immensely more species appropriate than carbs. It's not harmful unless your cat is diabetic, in which case carbs should be limited too since it turns into sugar.
Cats burn fat for energy. Far better than they use carbs. Fat in food prevents cats from using protein for energy. Instead, they can save protein for maintaining lean tissue. As cats age, they get less nutrition from their food because their digestion slows down. They need all the protein you can feed them to keep from wasting. A moderate amount of fat helps them keep more of this protein for maintaining themselves vs burning it up as energy. Look for protein on a dry matter basis of greater than 50%. This can be anywhere from 9-11% or higher overall depending on how much moisture is in the food. The other thing to look for is calories. Make sure she's eating a pate with at least 1000 Kcal/Kg ME or more than 1 calorie per gram of food. Shredded and gravy textures tend to be more water and carbs and less protein and overall calories.
The 1.3% is on a dry matter basis for Hound and Gatos. I've contacted them about it before. What's the moisture content on the Hill's Ideal balance?
That one wasn't working well for me either so I deleted the link.
mizzely
says, fat is very satiating!
It can indeed be very difficult to compare when the metrics are different. That's why it can be worth learning how to calculate the percentages on a dry matter basis, though this is very much a "garbage in, garbage out" sort of operation: you need good data from manufacturers to get a real sense of what's in the food. (This is why Weruva's site is so great: they offer the data in many formats. I wish other pet food companies did the same.) Dry matter figures are really important because you have to remove the water from the equation to know what's in the actual food. The varying percentages of water in foods ("as fed," which is a phrase frequently found when looking at the data) makes it impossible to compare until you take out the water. Taking out the water is like leveling the playing field. Here's a very decent article that explains dry matter and also looks at ingredient splitting.
This is probably way more than you want to know but... after sifting through cat food labels for (scary thought!) nearly six years now, I think my best advice is to first look at the ingredients. If I see carby ingredients, I immediately discard the food from consideration. (The Hill's Ideal Balance slow-cooked chicken, for example, includes brown rice, potato starch, rice starch, and two forms of peas, so would automatically be nixed.) I don't mean to pick on Hill's so I'll note that I also look for thickeners and other chemicals that I won't feed (Hound & Gatos has agar-agar, which I just don't know enough about because it's kinda-sorta similar to carrageenan, which I also won't feed because of study evidence that it's inflammatory to the digestive system). Not everybody's "no" lists are as constricting as mine but our cats have weird digestive systems and do best on very low carbs; there are enough foods without carrageenan and agar-agar that I can easily do away with those ingredients, too. (Feeding homemade has been a good decision!) Anyway, my point is that with hundreds or thousands of foods available, knowing your "nos" right away will make things a lot easier.
Although I try to keep the cats' foods all about protein and keep the carbs as low as possible, I don't worry about feeding some foods with relatively high fat. Even Dr. Pierson says that foods with 50% (and under) of calories from fat are fine, including for weight loss. She likes to see at least 40% of calories from protein. And less than 10% from carbs. There's nothing wrong with feeding some foods that are higher in fats, others that are lower. As
(Oops, for some reason some of yesterday's posts on this thread didn't load until mizzely's newest post came up... I'd already nearly finished this one so will just leave everything! And add a little more, too.)
I can answer that question quickly! We feed them commercial raw twice a day but we also feed them two meals a day of homemade cooked food, one made with Alnutrin, the other made with EZ Complete. Their fifth meal of the day is canned. They particularly love the homemade cooked foods!
